First proposed in April 2011, Alto was slated for a beta launch the following October. “What allowed us to move so quickly was having design, development, and product constantly talk in real time,” says Ramirez. “It wasn’t your typical waterfall process, where you define requirements, the developers build it, hand it off to QA, and 12 months later you have a product. This was continuous development.” Key details were ironed out during an off-site hackathon, in August, at a rustic retreat near Monterey, California. Says Ramirez, “We packed three weeks into six days.”
—Fast Company, ”AOL’s Alto Reimagines The Email Experience With A Twitter, Pinterest, Gmail Mashup”
