During my time at EOI Foundation's accelerator program, I co-led the project taking on an ambitious challenge: reinventing how remote development teams collaborate. We had 6 weeks to validate, build, and launch a solution that would make a real difference in how teams work together.

Problem: remote work is changing how development teams collaborate, and not always for the better. While tools for video calls and code sharing were abundant, teams were struggling with something more fundamental, the spontaneous knowledge sharing that happens in an office.

Goal: make remote pair programming as natural as turning to a colleague in the office. We wanted to eliminate the friction in finding help while preserving teams' existing workflows and tools.

We conducted 15 interviews with devs and tech leads. We realized that remote teams weren't struggling with the actual pair programming sessions, it was about everything around it. While teams valued collaborative coding practices, the logistics of remote sessions created significant barriers to adoption.

We identified potential issues we could leverage:

• Knowledge was becoming siloed in individual team members
• Junior developers were missing key learning opportunities
• Teams spent too much time coordinating across time zones
• The spontaneous "tap on the shoulder" for help was gone
• Employees with varying levels of technical expertise
• The lack cohesive teamwork
• Poor communication between teams

The real challenge wasn't technical, it was understanding how to recreate a natural flow of knowledge-sharing in a remote context.

"Finding the right person to pair with is often harder than solving the actual coding problem." - Senior Engineer

"Most of our knowledge sharing happens by accident - when someone overhears a problem being discussed. We've lost that in remote work." - Tech Lead

Hypothesis: if we could make finding programming partners effortless, developers would naturally maintain better collaboration and coding practices.

This was worth pursuing because: the problem was focused and solvable, teams were actively looking for solutions, we could deliver value in our 6-week timeline.

Our focus was speed and simplicity over complexity. Every feature decision was filtered through one question: "Does this make it faster and easier to get help?"

We had a 6-week timeline: The first two weeks focused on research and validation, where we dove deep into the problem space and tested basic flows with users before writing any production code.

This led to weeks three and four, where we built our core features: real-time availability, quick matching, and session creation, maintaining a sharp focus on reliability and speed.

Week five was dedicated to beta testing with 3 different teams, gathering crucial feedback while fixing bugs and polishing rough edges. In our final week, we concentrated on launch preparations, including thorough testing and documentation to ensure a smooth release.

Challenges

• Time zone handling proved more complex than expected. We simplified our approach to focus on "available now" status.
• Some teams were hesitant to adopt another tool. We overcame this by focusing on integration with existing workflows rather than replacing them.
• Overall availability of sesssions for users outside of company setups.

Learnings

• By solving one problem really well instead of many problems partially, we created more value for users.
• Our early insights about quick matches being more valuable than perfect matches proved correct.
• Sometimes the best solution isn't building something new, but making existing tools work better together.

Despite initial positive user feedback, we made the decision to discontinue Jumble after four months. While users who adopted the platform reported significant value - we struggled to achieve the critical mass needed for sustainable network effects.

The core challenge emerged: teams needed both helpers and help-seekers consistently active for the platform to provide value, but this circular dependency proved difficult to overcome. This experience provided valuable insights about network-dependent products and the specific challenges of building tools for developer workflows.