Underground navigation, emergency alert, and VoIP communication app for mining

The company, an established MiningTechcompany headquartered in Spain, needed to solve this challenge: “an undergroundnavigation app with emergency alerts and VoIP communication between miners andthe control room.” The in-house team was junior and had no established workingmethodology, which created delays that were hard to anticipate on a projectcritical to people's safety. As a company with no prior experience in softwareprojects, it also had no internal way to assess whether development was progressingat the pace and quality needed before deploying it in the mine.

Squad Challenge ran 6 challengestailored to the project's critical profiles —offline navigation, IoT telemetry,real-time VoIP communication, and mobile development—, with processes takingbetween 5 and 10 days depending on the complexity of each profile, ultimatelybringing on 15 remote professionals evaluated against the business case itself.

Squad Hiring managed, within 24h, theAOR-based hiring of the 15 professionals validated through Squad Challenge,handling contract generation adapted to each developer's country of origin,data validation, and the onboarding process.

Squad Master AI was a key piece of themanagement: since the company had no prior experience with software projects,its dashboards gave leadership an objective view of real progress, codequality, and each squad member's individual performance, without relying oninternal technical judgment.

The Enabling Team brought in a variedset of profiles —Agile Coach, DevOps Manager, Technical Lead, and ProductOwner— and organized the squad as a tribe with different chapters, with aflexible management methodology adapted to the company's traditionalhierarchical environment, including periodic reporting systems connected to itsregular committees.

The project brought on 15 remoteprofessionals (mobile, backend, VoIP, IoT/telemetry, QA, and Tech Lead) workingon a stack of Node.js (NestJS), Kotlin (Android), WebRTC/SIP, MQTT, PostgreSQL,Cassandra, GitLab, and Azure. The company had no in-house technical team withsoftware experience, so this squad, together with the Enabling Team, operatedas the product's engineering core. The project has been active for more than 20months, with 20% annual turnover that Squadmakers manages through new rounds ofSquad Challenge and Squad Hiring.