Find Visa Counsellor

The product

Find Visa Counsellor is a two-sided marketplace run by Worldview International Group. Applicants find a vetted immigration counsellor, book a consultation, chat in real time and share documents. Counsellors manage enquiries, availability and payments from their own dashboard. Both sides needed a web app and a native mobile app.

When I joined the group in April 2020, the product was a set of Bootstrap pages on a monolith. Chat ran through Twilio at a cost on every message, and the design had not been touched since launch. There was no mobile app, while competitors had apps in both stores. Seven months later I was asked to lead the rebuild.

My role

I was project manager and full-stack lead, with a team of three developers, two mobile developers and a designer, over 28 months from November 2020 to February 2023.

I spent the first two weeks reading the codebase, the analytics and the support inbox, then wrote a phased roadmap that the leadership team signed off. We redesigned first and re-platformed second, so components were built once. The new design gave applicants and counsellors separate experiences on one shared API, and we tested it with real counsellors before building.

The front-end moved to Nuxt.js with server-side rendering. We migrated it route by route behind the live domain, with the old pages still running, so users found problems in week two rather than month four.

I replaced Twilio with our own real-time chat service on Adonis.js and WebSockets: threads, attachments, read receipts and admin moderation. Then I defined the REST contract and the design handoff so the mobile team could build four apps in parallel: counsellor and applicant, on iOS and Android.

What changed

• The platform relaunched on Nuxt.js with a redesigned experience for both user types.
• Chat moved in-house, with no per-message cost.
• Four native apps shipped to the App Store and Google Play, all on one API.
• The internal team was documented and trained to run it without me.

In December 2021 the group asked the same team to take Worldview Pro from MVP to launch. The full story, stack and timeline are in the Find Visa Counsellor case study.