Vention

BACKGROUND

Please describe your company and your position there.

I'm the CTO of a fintech startup operating in Africa providing an API to business to be able to issue physical and virtual debit cards to their customers.

OPPORTUNITY / CHALLENGE

For what projects/services did your company hire iTechArt Group?

We needed back-end developers, business analysts, UX designers and QA testers to augment the small in-house team at Union54.

SOLUTION

How did you select this agency and what were the deciding factors?

iTechArt approached us when we concluded our Y-Combinator seed round - they made the process of scaling up the team painless and quick, whilst providing high quality resources.

Describe the project in detail and walk through the stages of the project.

The API was architected as a serverless, event-driven system that needed to scale effortlessly and provide a performant transaction processing capability. We therefore initially needed back-end developers with AWS serverless experience to add scale to the engineering team, as well as QA testers to ensure a quality product.

As the system grew in complexity, a business analyst was added to the team to help with the specification of new features. We also need to build an admin web interface, and at that point needed to add a UX designer to the team so our front-end developers had a well specified design to work from.

Describe the recruitment process in detail.

Initially we discussed requirements with the account manager, providing an outline job description for each of the roles. We were then able to interview the candidates and set them a practical exercise to assess their skills. Upon a successful result to the exercise, we agreed start dates and simply signed appropriate SOWs.

RESULTS & FEEDBACK

Can you share any outcomes from the engagement that demonstrate progress or success?

We were able to put our MVP into production within 3 months of inception and continue to issue new releases on a regular basis. This has allowed us to capture new clients on an ongoing basis.

How effective was the workflow between your team and theirs?

A daily standup helped to keep everyone up-to-date on each other's workloads, and we used a shared Jira kanban board to allocate workloads and check overall progress and move requirements from initial definition, through development, QA and into production.

What did you find most impressive or unique about this company?

The breadth and depth of talent that they have on tap is impressive, account management is also excellent - if any issues arose, they were swiftly dealt with in a positive manner.

Are there any areas for improvement or something they could have done differently?

As with all offshore / nearshore resourcing, sometimes English was a barrier to efficient communication, but with the addition of a business analyst with excellent English skills, this problem was actually addressed.

BACKGROUND

Please describe your company and your position there.

I am the Senior Engineering Manager within a Fintech company. I am responsible for the payments processing software teams.

OPPORTUNITY / CHALLENGE

For what projects/services did your company hire iTechArt Group, and what were your goals?

We were working on a project to roll out our product to the US. Part of the project involved developing a new payments architecture. For this we have four engineering teams focussing on different areas of the architecture. iTA provided both Go & PHP developers to build up our engineering teams.

SOLUTION

How did you select this vendor and what were the deciding factors?

I was referred to iTA by the head of our business unit who had made initial contact with iTA.

Describe the scope of work in detail, including the project steps, key deliverables, and technologies used.

The team worked on the development of new micro-services as part of our new payment architecture. This involved development in GO. In addition iTA provided one PHP developer to work on maintaining our existing solution.

How many people from the vendor's team worked with you, and what were their positions?

We had 6 engineers from iTA, from relatively junior software engineers through to senior engineers.

RESULTS & FEEDBACK

Can you share any measurable outcomes of the project or general feedback about the deliverables?

The iTA team members worked successfully within the teams to successfully deliver a quality solution (very low number of bugs) on schedule.

Describe their project management style, including communication tools and timeliness.

The teams worked as agile scrum teams. Each team has a dedicated scrum master. Jira was used as the project management tool. The teams followed all the standard ceremonies for scrum.

What did you find most impressive or unique about this company?

We were able to specify our requirements. iTA worked hard to understand our exact requirements, including working directly with their delivery manager, to ensure that the candidates provided met our requirements. In addition I met bi-weekly with their business manager who at all times was very helpful and enabled us to mutually provide feedback to each other.

Are there any areas for improvement or something they could have done differently?

Nothing

BACKGROUND

Please describe your company and your position there.

I am the cofounder and Head of Product & Experience at Aavia, a Gen Z female hormone health brand educating people and providing insights about their hormone cycle.

OPPORTUNITY / CHALLENGE

For what projects/services did your company hire iTechArt Group, and what were your goals?

We initially brought in iTechArt to build a community forum within our app, where members can post questions about their health to other members and medical advisors. Since we were impressed by their output, we continued working with them to build out insights, health logging, onboarding, and revamping the Bluetooth protocol to our hardware device.

SOLUTION

How did you select this vendor and what were the deciding factors?

We searched online for overseas contractors as most US hires were out of our startup budget. We chose iTechArt because they were not only affordable, but had strong candidates and have worked with ClassPass before, where we have an investor.

Describe the scope of work in detail, including the project steps, key deliverables, and technologies used.

Our product designer provided their team with wireframes and designs of a Reddit-style community page, where members can post questions, react to posts, and leave comments. As there were many Apple safety requirements for forums, we pushed out many iterations of the feature on TestFlight every other week for testing, before we pushed it live to our users after 3 months. Our members told us that the revamped community page is much more reliable than it used to be, which we were very happy with.

Now, we release builds every other week to our members with new feature updates, such as a new onboarding flow and actionable insights based on health logs.

How many resources from the vendor's team worked with you, and what were their positions?

We currently have 2 iOS developers from iTechArt.

RESULTS & FEEDBACK

Can you share any measurable outcomes of the project or general feedback about the deliverables?

Prior to iTechArt, we had several issues with the community forum, including comments appearing on the wrong posts, comments not appearing at all, or posts being displayed in the wrong order. They were able to fix all the issues and migrated everything from Firebase to Firestore. 

Describe their project management style, including communication tools and timeliness.

The developers are very communicative over Slack and update their tickets in Jira in a timely manner, making it easy to know where they are in their development process. 

What did you find most impressive or unique about this company?

I was impressed with how much the company cares for their employees. As they do have many developers in Ukraine and Belarus, they were able to provide relocation resources quickly to the developers when the Russian Invasion broke out. I also love that they not only match us with the developers based on their skills but also based on whether they would be a culture fit to the our company. 

Are there any areas for improvement or something they could have done differently?

Nothing I can think of!

BACKGROUND

Please describe your company and your position there.

I am the CPTO at DirectID. We are a company working in Open Banking and powering the systems that enable real-time credit and risk decisions.

OPPORTUNITY / CHALLENGE

For what projects/services did your company hire iTechArt Group, and what were your goals?

We needed to accelerate a series of our projects in different areas. We engaged iTechArt to provide 4 individuals who could augment 2 of our teams. The first team being our development team (writing for cloud based microservices). The second team being our data science team (providing data insights, models and ML to open banking data).

SOLUTION

How did you select this vendor and what were the deciding factors?

We needed the flexibility and capability across the broad spectrum of work.

Describe the scope of work in detail, including the project steps, key deliverables, and technologies used.

We work in sprints - and added this competence in our sprints to be able to achieve our goals.

How many people from the vendor's team worked with you, and what were their positions?

There were 4 in total. 3 in development and 1 in our data science team. They were all of a senior level in their discipline.

RESULTS & FEEDBACK

Can you share any measurable outcomes of the project or general feedback about the deliverables?

We achieved the timelines we needed. This process would not have been a success without iTechArt.

Describe their project management style, including communication tools and timeliness.

As the team were augmented they worked directly with us. Their English was fantastic and they raised any concerns, ideas or concepts well.

What did you find most impressive or unique about this company?

The flexibility and willingness to help. They solved problems in a quick and efficient way.

Are there any areas for improvement or something they could have done differently?

I do not believe so. They are a great organisation to deal with.

BACKGROUND

Please describe your company and your position there.

I am a co-founder of a keto diet company headquartered in New York.

OPPORTUNITY / CHALLENGE

For what projects/services did your company hire iTechArt Group, and what were your goals?

We wanted to rebuild and expand our existing Android app to be on both iOS and Android and add a huge number of features.

SOLUTION

How did you select this vendor and what were the deciding factors?

We searched online for a few months between freelance sites, google and clutch and interviewed over a dozen vendors. We decided to work with iTechArt due to how competent their team was throughout our meetings, as well as the overall assessed cost for our project.

Describe the scope of work in detail, including the project steps, key deliverables, and technologies used.

We decided on utilizing React Native so we could hire one team to build out both iOS and Android apps simultaneously. We worked 3 specialists from iTechArt - frontend, backend and API developers. Our redesigned app had dozens of screens and hundreds of new features which we built out over 3 years with updates released roughly every one or two weeks.

How many resources from the vendor's team worked with you, and what were their positions?

We hired a frontend, backend and API developer.

RESULTS & FEEDBACK

Can you share any measurable outcomes of the project or general feedback about the deliverables?

We launched the new version of the app after about 6 months on both iOS and Android. The new app was a huge success and had optimized performance speed and quality compared to the original Android app (even though that one was fully native). We're very happy with the team and final results of the app (we had ongoing development for 3 years).

Describe their project management style, including communication tools and timeliness.

We used slack for communication and I (co-founder) was effectively the project manager as I had enough experience from a technical and design standpoint to work with the developers. The team worked quickly and was extremely responsive.

What did you find most impressive or unique about this company?

Their mobile app development skills were very high level. There wasn't a problem they couldn't solve.

Are there any areas for improvement or something they could have done differently?

The team was great with not much room for improvement. I'm very familiar with development and delays and know to expect possible issues that come up sometimes.

BACKGROUND

Please describe your company and your position there.

I'm the Head of Engineering at tails.com - a company that provides tailor-made pet food via subscription to over 250,000 pets monthly in 9 countries and counting.

OPPORTUNITY / CHALLENGE

For what projects/services did your company hire iTechArt Group, and what were your goals?

We hired iTechArt to place engineers into our existing teams in an augmented way, as well as standalone teams to deliver an entire project on their own.

SOLUTION

How did you select this vendor and what were the deciding factors?

We were looking for a company that could offer us great talent quickly, at times when we'd have peak resource needs and hiring in the UK would take too long but also for side projects so that our perm team can continue to focus on our main projects.

The engineering pool size and quality at iTechArt stood out as substantially above their competitors when speaking to the company and some of the engineers - which was then underpinned once we started working with them.

Describe the scope of work in detail, including the project steps, key deliverables, and technologies used.

Engineers from iTechArt worked on several projects with us, ranging from Python-based APIs to full-stack applications written in Python and Vue.js, to pure frontend single-page applications written in Nuxt.js

How many people from the vendor's team worked with you, and what were their positions?

We've worked with up to 5 engineers, which included a mix of frontend, full-stack and back-end specialists.

RESULTS & FEEDBACK

Can you share any measurable outcomes of the project or general feedback about the deliverables?

Despite a very tough and immovable timeline, the Nuxt.js project was delivered bang on time and with fantastic results. They deliver strong code quality, high test coverage, and brilliant architectural design.

Describe their project management style, including communication tools and timeliness.

We did the project management ourselves, working directly with the engineers. All of them were strong communicators, always available and reacted quickly to changes in scope and priorities.

What did you find most impressive or unique about this company?

The quality of engineers. We've worked with other near-shore companies in the past and despite giving them a clear brief, ended up rejecting the vast majority of profiles that were put forward to us. iTechArt was the opposite. Profiles were on point and when we interviewed the engineers, almost all of them were added to the team. (for comparison, we hire 1 out of 300 perm applicants)

Are there any areas for improvement or something they could have done differently?

Not that I can think of. Marc was always there to check if things are going well and even at the slightest challenge he reacted quickly so solve it. Can't ask for more.

BACKGROUND

Introduce your business and what you do there.

I am the head of engineering for a UK-based property portal that hosts properties for sale or rent for several real estate agents. The app also has several additional features, including home moving, energy, and broadband services. We also have a service that allows buyers and renters to submit forms to book evaluation and viewing appointments. 

OPPORTUNITY / CHALLENGE

What challenge were you trying to address with iTechArt Group?

We wanted to bring on an offshore team to scale our team up and down where we needed to.  

SOLUTION

What was the scope of their involvement?

iTechArt Group’s developers work alongside our team on website development. They also work on the backend of our system and handle some other development aspects. Since our company is still young, their team has played a big part in developing each aspect of our platform from scratch. 

What is the team composition?

About 8–10 teammates from iTechArt Group are embedded in my engineering department. On average, each team in my department has 1–2 iTechArt Group teammates. 

How did you come to work with iTechArt Group?

My CTO and I worked with a few development companies before looking at iTechArt Group. My CTO knew the CTO of iTechArt Group, so we contacted them. We had a chat with them and highlighted our product, what it was, and what we wanted to achieve. 

We were looking for a specific engagement style that wasn’t purely project work; we wanted to embed iTechArt Group teammates into our internal teams. We needed a company that we could partner with long-term that could develop a deep knowledge of our product and our voice. 

After we discussed our engagement plans and the different roles we needed to fill, iTechArt Group provided us with some developers to interview. Those developers needed to have good technical and communication skills. A lot of their team had experience in the type of engagement style we wanted and knew how to scale projects up and down. Also, we liked that iTechArt Group had UK-based managers that we could talk to without worrying about communication issues or language barriers. So, we hired them. 

How much have you invested in them?

We’ve invested about £1 million (approximately $1.3 million USD) with iTechArt Group.

What is the status of this engagement?

The partnership began in July 2020 and it is ongoing.

RESULTS & FEEDBACK

What evidence can you share that demonstrates the impact of the engagement?

There are no specific metrics I can point to that measure the impact of our engagement with iTechArt Group, but we are happy with their work, and our partnership is continuing. The developers from iTechArt Group have really helped my company build and launch the platform — they continue to ensure the platform runs smoothly. 

How did iTechArt Group perform from a project management standpoint?

iTechArt Group’s project management is good — we have a direct people management style. We have regular meetings, and each iTechArt Group teammate has an individual meeting with an internal team lead. They take feedback well and are consistently promoted for their high-quality work. 

We use various tools for communication, including Slack, Microsoft Teams, and a video call platform. 

What did you find most impressive about them?

Compared to other companies I’ve worked with, iTechArt Group’s developers are more experienced and passionate about their work. There are a lot of teammates who make the extra effort and work past contracted hours to deliver for us. It makes our entire partnership work smoothly — iTechArt Group isn’t just there to complete a task, they’re building a product with us.

Are there any areas they could improve?

It would be helpful if iTechArt Group and I worked together to set up review meetings every 3–6 months to discuss the overall team, what is working well, and what isn’t. While we do have regular meetings, we don’t often look at the broader picture to see how team growth might help our project over time. 

Do you have any advice for potential customers?

I would advise customers to talk through the type of engagement they are looking for with iTechArt Group and the developers they want. My company spent a lot of time interviewing their team members, treating the early stages of our partnership as a recruitment phase, and I would advise other companies to do the same.

BACKGROUND

Please describe your company and your position there.

I am the Director of Engineering of a learning platform and content creation company.

OPPORTUNITY / CHALLENGE

For what projects/services did your company hire iTechArt Group, and what were your goals?

We hired iTechArt to add to our internal team of developers, to assist with large upgrades to our systems, and offer ongoing development of new features. We also used them for our annual penetration testing.

SOLUTION

How did you select this vendor and what were the deciding factors?

We searched for vendors online, and did interviews with their sales team, and then in some cases with developers from their team. Cost, ability to work in house with our team and scaling options were the deciding factors.

Describe the scope of work in detail, including the project steps, key deliverables, and technologies used.

We have used the team for a large scope of work, but key things have been upgrading our Python backend, migrating our database to SQL and updating our JavaSript code base to use React.

How many people from the vendor's team worked with you, and what were their positions?

We have had two lead engineers, and four mid level engineers working directly with our team.

RESULTS & FEEDBACK

Can you share any measurable outcomes of the project or general feedback about the deliverables?

We are still in the working stages of the project and have no measurable outcomes yet. Early signs of improvement to API response speed is heading in the right direction.

Describe their project management style, including communication tools and timeliness.

We use Slack, Jira and weekly calls via Zoom. All the team are highly available and are good to work with. Leaders on the team manage their teams well, and have worked directly with internal developers and stakeholders when required.

What did you find most impressive or unique about this company?

Their team is easy to work with, and they all continue to work hard.

Are there any areas for improvement or something they could have done differently?

We had some issues early on with one developer, who was removed from the team. Identifying that earlier internally to iTechArt would have been better, but once the concerns were flagged, the management team dealt with the issue swiftly.

BACKGROUND

Please describe your company and your position there.

TWINO is fintech company which created unique investment platform for p2p lending business model. In 2021 TWINO acquired Investment Brokerage services license and is on the way to provide asset back securities investments and other financial instruments (CFD, stocks, crypto, ETF, etc.) for investors. My position is CTO of TWINO and I'm responsible about all IT strategy and execution within TWINO companies.

OPPORTUNITY / CHALLENGE

For what projects/services did your company hire iTechArt Group, and what were your goals?

After receiving Investment Brokerage services license we needed to re-design our web application according to new business model and offering. As hiring of in-house team was challenging and we needed to move fast, we were looking for reliable outsource partner who could help us reach goal - redesign web app on latest tech and designs to provide new services to investors

SOLUTION

How did you select this vendor and what were the deciding factors?

We were creating shortlist and sending out practical task to outsource partner engineers. Then we choose company which engineers submitted best results for interview. In interview we checked if developer fits in team and has our mindset of things. iTechArt checked all the boxes and had great results.

Describe the scope of work in detail, including the project steps, key deliverables, and technologies used.

We had on-boarding meeting to explain project, team process, technology stack and introduce with other team members. Technology used is VueJs and Nuxt. Project was split in several steps and roadmap created. Team worked according to roadmap

How many people from the vendor's team worked with you, and what were their positions?

Three front-end VueJs developers from which 1 is senior and 2 is middle.

RESULTS & FEEDBACK

Can you share any measurable outcomes of the project or general feedback about the deliverables?

Project is still in development, but implemented features makes page much more compelling and with better user experience. Also implementation speed due to new tech is much faster and easier.

Describe their project management style, including communication tools and timeliness.

Daily standups in Slack, weekly grooming's and status update. Sprint planning, retrospectives and check-ups.

What did you find most impressive or unique about this company?

Expertise and interest in our project. We consider us to be on the same team with the project and it feels like we are on the same page. They are interested to give best to our project and team.

Are there any areas for improvement or something they could have done differently?

They have been great!

BACKGROUND

Please describe your company and your position there.

I am the President of custom software development company

OPPORTUNITY / CHALLENGE

For what projects/services did your company hire iTechArt Group, and what were your goals?

Occasionally, when we don't have our own resources, we partner with companies who have the required talent.

SOLUTION

How did you select this vendor and what were the deciding factors?

We found that whenever we need solid software engineers, iTechArt was a company tat we knew we can rely on. They have grown tremendously in the last several years, while maintaining the quality of their programmers.

Describe the scope of work in detail, including the project steps, key deliverables, and technologies used.

The iTechArt engineers worked with us on several engagements. Not only were they one of the bests in terms of sills, but they have also been a reliable partner to work with.

How many people from the vendor's team worked with you, and what were their positions?

We have employed various number of people over the last couple of years on various projects, and hope to continue this fruitful collaboration.

RESULTS & FEEDBACK

Can you share any measurable outcomes of the project or general feedback about the deliverables?

The customers where we partnered with iTechArt have been impressed by the quality of our work, timeliness and attitude to work

Describe their project management style, including communication tools and timeliness.

Most of our projects are Agile with 2-week long sprints. The teams are very comfortable working in this agile environment.

What did you find most impressive or unique about this company?

We've been most impressed by the strong technical skills of their software engineers.

Are there any areas for improvement or something they could have done differently?

As everyone else, iTechArt is facing the labor force crunch and the increases in labor costs. We have to find a level that works for our customers.