Case study 15
MUST Mate
MUST Mate, from MUST Company, is an AI-powered project management tool built around time. Teams track time on tasks, see project progress and time efficiency at a glance, and turn logged hours into detailed reports, transparent client billing and payroll, with attendance management in the same app. Team performance views help managers spot productivity pitfalls, and integrations connect it to the tools a team already uses. I joined after the app was built, as a full-stack engineer on the team that maintained it.
- Full-stack engineer (maintenance)
- Enterprise
- May 2024 – Jun 2026
- SaaS, AI
- Project Management, Time Tracking, Payroll, Performance Optimization, Maintenance
- Express
- Next.js
- TypeScript
- DynamoDB
What MUST Mate does
- Time tracking on tasks and projects
- Project time visualization and real-time progress
- Detailed reports on time and productivity
- Precise, transparent client billing from tracked time
- Attendance management and payroll from logged hours
- Team performance analysis
- Integrations with other workplace apps
- Starter, Advanced and Enterprise plans
The problem
A time-tracking tool is only useful if people trust it: hours have to be recorded correctly, reports have to load quickly, and billing and payroll have to match what was logged.
Approach
As part of the team maintaining MUST Mate, I worked from issues raised by users and the support team, reproducing and fixing bugs across the API and the frontend and improving performance where the app was slow.
Key decisions
- D1
Reproduce first
Each bug report was reproduced before fixing, so the fix addressed the real cause rather than the symptom.
- D2
Measure before optimizing
Performance work started from where the app was actually slow, not from guesses.
- D3
Close the loop with support
Fixes went back through the support team, so users heard when their issue was resolved.
My contributions
- Joined the team after the app was built, as a full-stack engineer at MUST Company
- Found and fixed bugs across the Express API and the Next.js frontend
- Improved performance across the app
- Worked with the support team to keep the app running for its users
Challenges
- Getting productive quickly in a codebase that was already built, by someone else
- Tracking down bugs from user reports through the support team
- Improving performance in a live app without disrupting the teams using it