Recently, the Zivtech team decided to run some Google Ad campaigns. Before the campaigns launched, I was tasked with creating several different landing pages for each of the campaigns.

As it was, Zivtech’s landing page layout did not effectively convey the proper information to our audience. After a bit of research, the team agreed on a layout that would display the most important information first, allow for images to be aligned with text, and feature a call to action at the bottom of the page.

As Zivtech’s marketing coordinator, I don’t possess the technical skills needed to make the changes I envisioned for the landing pages myself. I had to verbally convey these changes to our Senior Front End Developer, John Kaeser, and hope he understood what I was explaining.

After I went to John with my edits, he created a pull request that triggered a Probo build, then sent me a link for review. The link took me to a sandbox site that looked identical to Zivtech’s real site. Here, I was able to easily review and test the changes and provide feedback before they were pushed live.

The changes he made looked great, but I noticed that the form fields were missing asterisks that indicated that the text fields were required, and some of the text on the page wasn’t centered. I also realized that the topic of the page wasn’t clear and that it needed a subheading for clarification.

I sent this feedback to John and he made the second round of revisions that triggered a Probo build and sent me a link for review. The new features looked great, so after John pushed the changes live, I published the pages I had been working on.

My role at Zivtech means that I’m adept in talking about and marketing our products, but it isn’t every day that I get to work with them. I experienced first-hand how the Probo preview environment is essential for non-technical stakeholders to review changes and provide feedback. I was also pleasantly surprised by how quick the process of adding, changing, and pushing new features live was.

In this case, Probo was being used on a small scale. I was working with one developer to make minor changes on our site. However, it’s obvious how effective Probo can be for client projects that are more complex.

When you have multiple teams working on a single project it can be very easy to end up working in development silos. Development silos can lead to a slew of issues including development bottlenecks. However, with a continuous integration tool like Probo, both technical and non-technical staff can collaborate together toward a common goal.

Probo breaks down the barriers between technical and non-technical staff and other stakeholders by improving the feedback loop and ensuring transparency in the software development process.