Doctavis: Racing the Clock to Ship an MVP

A few months ago, Zoé Finders, founder of Doctavis, contacted us to explain her project and, above all, the role we could play in it.

We were immediately won over by the idea and did not hesitate to do everything we could to make this project a success.

And who better to talk about it than the person herself? Here is the story of Doctavis and Efficience IT.

1 - Tell Us About Your Project

At the start, Doctavis is above all a personal story. That of a dynamic young executive who meets illness for the first time.

A workaholic, I took an unreasonable pleasure in managing teams (up to 80 people) at 60 hours a week, non-stop, in the department store sector, after a work-study master's degree in marketing at Galeries Lafayette.

After imagining many scenarios for my seemingly set future in that company, I discovered, somewhat by chance, that I had cancer at the age of 25, and the illness called everything into question.

Three difficult years went by, during which I had to rethink all of my priorities, my lifestyle, my diet and my way of working, to finally ask myself about my real ambitions, my values and my commitments.

That is where the idea of Doctavis was born. The goal was to create a project that made sense, was truly useful and user-friendly, and clearly fit within sustainable development in the "impact investment" sense, answering a real need, even if it meant experimenting with a new business model to answer it effectively.

2 - How Did You Find Efficience IT, and What Were Your First Exchanges Like?

Efficience IT was strongly recommended to me by my network. We first exchanged by email, and very quickly the project manager contacted me.

We had several video conference calls to determine my needs, with the developers present, to validate the feasibility of the technical work.

The project manager then quickly came back to me with specifications (in French) in line with our discussions, and we embarked on the adventure.

3 - What Did You Appreciate About Working With the Team?

Since Doctavis was my first project of this kind, I was afraid at first that I would not manage to convey a clear vision of my needs. The whole team was very kind to me, explaining every step of the work. I got answers to each of my questions, and communication was truly smooth thanks to the various tools Efficience IT put in place: Slack, Clickup, ...

4 - Do You Consider This Collaboration a Success? What Improvements Could Be Considered?

Our collaboration is a real success, and it is by looking at the final product that you realize how far we have come! Besides having an operational SaaS product (in French), thanks to this project I discovered new tools that let me evolve the platform.

The Efficience team did not simply support me technically on the project. They were a source of ideas and truly helped me improve the solution.

5 - A Few Closing Words?

A big thank you to the whole team for your commitment and responsiveness! Looking forward to working with you again on V2!

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Behind the Scenes of the Doctavis MVP

Zoé's testimonial perfectly illustrates the human dynamic of the project. But behind every feature delivered, there were decisive technical choices that made it possible to meet the deadlines. Here is a complementary view from the Efficience IT side on how we approached this MVP.

Why an MVP and Not a Full Product?

When Zoé presented her vision for Doctavis, the list of desired features was ambitious. Building the entire platform in one go would have taken months, delayed the market launch and tied up substantial resources with no guarantee of success with users.

So we proposed an MVP approach, inspired by Lean Startup. The principle is simple: identify the core of the product's value, build it quickly, put it in the hands of real users and iterate based on their feedback. Rather than betting on assumptions, you validate them in the field.

For Doctavis, this meant focusing on the main user journey and temporarily setting aside secondary features. Each candidate feature was evaluated through a simple filter: is it essential for the first user to get value from the product? If the answer was no, the feature went into the backlog for a later iteration.

Choosing Symfony to Deliver Fast and Well

For an MVP, the choice of framework is strategic. You need a tool that lets you develop quickly without sacrificing code quality or the ability to evolve the product afterward. Symfony was the natural choice for several reasons, and our expertise in custom web development (in French) let us meet the deadlines with no compromise on quality.

First, its bundle ecosystem means you do not have to reinvent the wheel. User management, email sending, form validation: dozens of proven building blocks are available and plug in with a few lines of configuration. A tour of the most widely used bundles in Symfony projects (in French) shows the extent of what is ready to use. For a time-constrained project, this is a decisive advantage.

Next, Symfony imposes a clean, maintainable code structure, as our article on reasons to choose Symfony for your projects (in French) details. An MVP is not a throwaway prototype. It is the foundation on which V2 will be built. Choosing a framework that encourages best practices from the start means avoiding starting over from scratch when the product has to grow.

Finally, the Efficience IT team knows Symfony in depth. In a race against the clock, working with tools you know perfectly eliminates a major source of friction and unexpected bugs.

What We Prioritized

Prioritization is the hardest exercise in an MVP. With Zoé, we defined three non-negotiable focus areas together for the first version.

The first was user experience. Doctavis serves people who are sometimes weakened by illness. The interface had to be intuitive, accessible and reassuring. We invested time in usability rather than in advanced features that are barely visible.

The second was reliability. An MVP can be limited in features, but what it does, it must do correctly. Critical journeys were tested rigorously to guarantee a flawless experience from launch.

The third was speed to production. Each extra week of development delayed the confrontation with the market. We favored pragmatic, proven solutions over sophisticated architectures, keeping in mind that a reflection on choosing between microservices and a modular monolith (in French) would come in later iterations.

The Day-to-Day Way of Working

The project ran in short sprints, with regular check-ins between the technical team and Zoé. Slack enabled quick daily exchanges, while Clickup centralized task tracking and visibility on progress.

This transparency was essential. Zoé could see in real time where development stood, ask her questions and adjust priorities if needed. For a founder discovering the world of development, this visibility turned what could have been a stressful experience into a calm collaboration.

Regular demos also let us validate choices along the way rather than at the end of the project. When a screen did not exactly match Zoé's vision, we could course-correct immediately, without accumulating technical debt (in French).

Lessons Learned From This Project

The Doctavis project confirmed several convictions we hold at Efficience IT.

The first lesson is that communication is worth as much as code. A technically perfect project that the project owner does not understand is a failure. Taking the time to explain, rephrase and regularly show the product under construction is an integral part of development work.

The second lesson is that saying no to certain features is an act of responsibility. Agreeing to build everything at once would have endangered the project as a whole. By guiding Zoé toward a realistic scope for the MVP, we protected both the schedule and the resources.

The third lesson is that the choice of tools gains or loses you weeks. Thanks to its maturity and the richness of its ecosystem, Symfony let us focus on Doctavis's specific business logic rather than on generic technical problems the framework had already solved. This technical expertise (in French) makes the difference in time-constrained projects.

Finally, a successful MVP is one that makes people want a V2. The fact that Zoé ends her testimonial with "Looking forward to working with you again on V2" is the best proof that the approach worked.

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Do you have a project idea? Contact Efficience IT, who will support you all along the way!

Going Further

• How to write specifications for an Agile project, structuring your project to maximize its chances of success
• Why choose Symfony for your projects, the technical reasons that make it the reference framework for line-of-business projects
• Web application maintenance: why choose us (in French), ensuring the MVP lasts after going to production
• Symfony: the PHP framework for web projects, the framework used to build the Doctavis MVP
• Lean Startup: MVP methodology, the Lean Startup approach that inspires how MVPs are built
• API Platform: framework for building APIs, a tool for quickly building robust APIs with Symfony