From Side Project to Five Deliverables: How Olkano Used ITM Platform to Ship Faster

When the team at Olkano set out to build a daily check-in app for families worried about loved ones living alone, they thought the hardest part would be the app itself. They were wrong.

“What looks like a simple app is actually five different products that need to ship together,” says Michael Jowels, Olkano’s CTO. “The mobile app is just the tip of the iceberg.”

The iceberg under the app

Olkano’s daily check-in is straightforward from the user’s perspective: a loved one receives a gentle prompt each day, taps to confirm they’re okay, and the family gets peace of mind. But delivering that experience required five coordinated workstreams:

1. The mobile app - a React Native application for iOS and Android, handling the daily check-in interaction itself.
2. An invitation portal - a simplified web experience designed specifically for people who are not comfortable with technology. This is how families onboard the person they care about, and it had to be almost frictionless.
3. A backend with real-time alerting - the engine that schedules check-ins, processes responses, and triggers notifications when someone doesn’t respond.
4. A push notification pipeline - not just “send a push” but a reliable, timed delivery system that handles timezone differences, retry logic, and escalation to family members.
5. An admin dashboard - for managing accounts, monitoring alert patterns, and supporting users.

Each of these workstreams had its own technical stack, its own timeline pressures, and its own definition of “done.” But they all had to converge into a single, coherent product.

Why portfolio visibility changed the game

Olkano’s CTO had managed complex projects before, but this one had a particular challenge: the dependencies between workstreams were not always obvious.

“We had a moment early on where the backend team was about to change the API contract for check-in responses. Perfectly reasonable from their perspective - cleaner data model, better performance. But that change would have broken both the invitation portal and the notification pipeline. Without a unified view across all five tracks, we wouldn’t have caught it until integration testing.”

The team used ITM Platform to structure Olkano as a mini-portfolio rather than a single project. Each workstream became its own project, with cross-project dependencies explicitly tracked.

“The portfolio view gave us something we couldn’t get from a task board: the ability to see when a decision in one workstream was about to create work in three others. That’s not a task-level insight. It’s a portfolio-level insight.”

The invitation portal problem

One workstream deserves special attention: the invitation portal. Olkano’s core user is often an elderly parent or relative who may not be comfortable downloading apps or creating accounts. The portal had to guide them through setup with minimal steps and zero jargon.

“Designing for people who struggle with technology is a project management challenge, not just a UX one,” Olkano’s CTO explains. “Every simplification on the user’s side added complexity on ours. Removing a step from the onboarding flow meant adding logic to the backend, updating the notification rules, and adjusting the admin dashboard. Those ripple effects are exactly what a portfolio tool is built to surface.”

What worked

The team points to three specific benefits of managing the work as a portfolio:

Cross-project dependencies became first-class citizens. Rather than tracking them informally in Slack threads or meeting notes, each dependency was visible in ITM Platform and owned by someone.

Resource conflicts surfaced early. When the same developer was needed for both the notification pipeline and the invitation portal during the same sprint, the conflict appeared in the resource view before it became a bottleneck.

Stakeholder communication got simpler. Instead of assembling five separate status updates, the team could show a single portfolio dashboard that told the full story.

The result

Olkano launched on both Android and iOS with all five workstreams delivered. The invitation portal - the part that worried the team most - became one of the product’s strongest features, with families reporting that even their least tech-savvy relatives could complete setup on their own.

“We treated what looked like a small project with the rigor of a bigger one,” says the CTO. “ITM Platform gave us that structure without the overhead. Five projects, one portfolio, one coherent product.”

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Olkano is a daily check-in app that helps families stay connected with loved ones living alone. Learn more at olkano.com.