Five, an Endava company

BACKGROUND

Introduce your business and what you do there.

My business manages and launches multiple conferences in the tech space throughout the world, including the leading tech conference in Europe and one of the leading tech conferences in America and Asia.

OPPORTUNITY / CHALLENGE

What challenge were you trying to address with Five?

Previously, we had a mobile application that was outsourced for one of our conferences in 2013 or 2014. There were a lot of issues that arose from that. For instance, they didn't scale as quickly as we wanted to as a conference. So we wanted to work with a new agency and figure out who we could work with on the current application to improve the app, fix bugs, etc., and then also work with us on another version of the mobile application that would kind of extend everything that we wanted for the next four to five years. The apps we developed are for iOS and Android. 

SOLUTION

What was the scope of their involvement?

Initially, when we hired Five, we did a review and kind of got them to evaluate our current mobile app. For the first one or two apps, they did bug fixing and rebranding. Based on this, we got quite excited about doing the new version of the mobile app with them. The idea was to have a complete conference app that did scheduling, networking, discovery, registrations, etc. I think we only had an average of around six months from an idea in my head to actual delivery and launch.

After speaking with their team, it was decided that we’d do a workshop in Croatia so I could meet them face to face. I met the project manager, the UX team, the UI team, the development team, and the founder. We went through a workshop to understand what the business objectives were, some kind of patterns that we could use, what we didn't like, and the direction of where we were going to go. It was quite interesting.

From there, I worked closely with the UI and UX teams. At that point, I think there were around 10 UI and 10 UX team members. There were about four engineers on the engineering team — two dedicated and two more senior. We worked with them in getting a few prototypes of what visually should work from a few iterations from that. It got signed off, and we worked on the technology aspects and the API requirements. This was a completely new application for them to develop and for us with new API. As they were doing the frontend and mobile app, we internally were doing the complete architecture for the API. Throughout this period, we were doing QA testing and weekly builds.

We communicated constantly on where we were and what that delivery was. We went through the process in sprints. On top of getting daily updates on weekly builds, the sprints were on a two-week basis. In this case, every two weeks we had a final build ready and a significant feature would be released. This was quite successful and it was quite interesting to be able to constantly talk to Five’s team and readjust features, requests, and any concerns that any of the stakeholders had. 

How did you come to work with Five?

There was another person that was in charge of the mobile apps before myself. He decided to outsource to Holland. That didn't go too well, so I decided to go a different direction.

I reached out to a few friends and colleagues of mine. We built a list of 10 companies from Ireland, where we’re based, and then 10 within Europe. There were two companies that were highly rated within Croatia. Through all the evaluations and applications we tested, I got an understanding of Five’s approach and the direction that they take. It really resonated with me. When we compared Five to the other companies that also did the evaluation, I felt a lot more comfortable with having one team build an app from scratch and understand the business and technical aspects as well as the user experience. That experience solidified my goal for the application. It was very easy to choose Five at that point.

How much have you invested with Five?

I got lots of good deals, which is quite cool. I think we had around six or seven different conference apps over two years, and I think that cost us around €200,000 ($219,700).

What is the status of this engagement?

I think the first app we did with Five was at the end of 2014 or the start of 2015. I’m terrible with dates. I left the company a couple of months ago, and I delivered the project to another party within the company, and that information was within those contract documents. I think our work with Five stopped around December 2016. For the last couple of months though, Five and the new agency and team have been working on those apps in regard to providing support, documentation, any additional feedback, etc.

RESULTS & FEEDBACK

Could you share any evidence that would demonstrate the productivity, quality of work, or the impact of the engagement?

I know all the data that Five has on a case study is valid. Some of the interesting data was that at a conference, most people were spending at least 10 minutes per session on the app, which was a lot more than we were expecting. I think over 90% of conference attendees downloaded the app and used it each day of the conference. This isn't necessarily public, but around 3 million unique conversations and chats happened using the applications over the last year. 

The feedback that we got from the UI/UX was really fantastic. We had a lot of high CEOs appraising it and saying how much they loved it. The bugs and issues we had were because the API wasn’t integrating with the app. One of the big issues was that when the Android users downloaded the app, there was an issue with how they downloaded the attendee database. Because one of the requirements that we had was that everything should work offline, that would mean that the app would need to cache around 30,000 attendees. One of the problems was that one of my colleagues internally, the day before we publicly launched the app, changed how the adjacent was returned to the app. When we announced the app, a lot of the attendees that were using Android were having a lot of problems downloading the database and being able to log in. Those are some of the issues we had.

Another one was from a third-party service in which the framework that we needed to integrate with them wasn’t being considered and was quite problematic in regard to storing the messages and conversation. I've spoken directly to the third party about a loss through the iterations that we’ve done, and we’ve resolved all of those issues. I think those would be the main ones. 

How did Five perform from a project management standpoint?

I think Five has done fantastically well from a project management standpoint. I’d definitely work with them again. There were a couple of things that made this project a challenge. We were working with a team that was in another country and time zone, and we also were dealing with a code base without ever changing features or functionality, and that’s really difficult. They work constantly though, and they’re really passionate about what they do. It was kind of refreshing to not have all of that pressure just to myself. I was managing these projects and other projects at the time, and I really appreciated the fact that I could kind of talk about this application or these features and get an honest opinion from Five. It felt like we were able to work toward these goals as part of a team rather than in a customer-client kind of relationship. I found them personable and professional, which I respected. We mainly used Slack, Skype, and email to communicate.

Because of the way the business and conferences work, we have extremely tight deadlines. When working with Five, we’ve always had a strategy of having a minimal amount of requirements, and then releasing the app a month or two before the event as a soft launch. I’d say around 89% of the time we’ve launched on time. The other percentage would be more because of our organization rather than Five’s and because of additional requests and issues with the API from our end.

What did you find most impressive about Five?

I thought everyone at Five was super passionate. They understood the full product cycle of what we were trying to achieve compared to other agencies that we had reached out to. I think they have a great sales team as well, and they didn’t just work from nine to five. If I had an issue or concern in the middle of the night, they would be there, even though I wasn’t expecting them to reply to me. They would talk to me, and we’d discuss the issues we were having. They seemed to be invested in what they were working on, and I think when you have people who are really invested, you get the best quality of work. That’s why we chose them rather than any other agency.

Are there any areas Five could improve?

In the future, I think Five should support their team as much as possible and probably fight back when the client is demanding more than what’s possible. It’s a bit of a weird answer.

BACKGROUND

Introduce your business and what you do there.

We provide a mobile marketing platform and have evolved from mobile apps to a mobile SDK [software development kit]. The data we process are primarily location-based. I am the vice president of engineering, focusing on the mobile side of things. 

OPPORTUNITY / CHALLENGE

What challenge were you trying to address with Five?

We offer a platform to publishers, which they can use to build customized mobile apps. We had a local development partner in the US but wanted to switch. 

SOLUTION

What was the scope of their involvement?

Five is developing our mobile apps, as well as the SDK for ads—both on the iOS side. They’ve brought in an app framework, which we use in combination with other tools in order to customize and configure our solution for different publishers. We are using Objective-C as well as Swift, more recently.

We are using a small engineering team on a continuous basis. They primarily provide software development, but we have engaged them for UI/UX design from time to time. There has been paywall development, as well as a custom app which Five developed for us.

How did you come to work with Five?

The decision was made before I joined the company. There were some good references for Five from some people on our team.

What is the status of this engagement?

I personally started working with Five around August or September of 2013. 

RESULTS & FEEDBACK

Could you share any evidence that would demonstrate the productivity, quality of work, or impact of the engagement?

Five is working with our team on a daily basis, so all the metrics are co-owned. We have gone through several different versions of the apps and SDK and two different versions of the iOS environment, and we have built different features. On average, we’ve pushed one version of the SDK to the public repository each month. This gives an idea of the pace of work we have. The quality of Five’s resources is excellent, and what we’re getting from them reflects what we want. From working with the engineers to working with the company itself, we’ve always been comfortable. Five is a considerate, courteous, and accommodating team with respect to our demands and pressures. We’ve had critical issues over the weekend, but Five’s engineer was willing to fix it, even though it was his time off. Five has really taken ownership of our product.

The quality of the work is good, but it’s based on our cases. We will sometimes ask Five’s team to cut corners. Any issues have been due to us pushing things, rather than Five not being up to the mark.

How did Five perform from a project management standpoint?

We don’t use Five for project management since we handle this ourselves. There’s never been an issue on their side. We use JIRA and Confluence on the pooling side, and we also have regular email exchanges. We use Skype for daily standups with Five’s team.

They’ve always conformed to our budget and timeline. We work on a retainer basis.

What did you find most impressive about Five?

They have the ability to get anything done and will find a way to accomplish anything we ask for, even if it is outside of the norm. Technically, Five’s team is very sound.

Are there any areas Five could improve?

We have been working with Five for a long time, and things have been working well. We will communicate any changes or improvements we identify, and Five will do them. If an engineer leaves the company, Five will provide a replacement. Even in terms of supplemental items, which fall outside of our regular statement of work, Five has been very responsive. 

BACKGROUND

Introduce your business and what you do there.

I head up the global consumer division of Rosetta Stone, the language-learning company.

OPPORTUNITY / CHALLENGE

What challenge were you trying to address with Five?

We were looking to improve our mobile app experiences.

SOLUTION

What was the scope of their involvement?

We had an app for both Android and iOS, and it was a cross-compiled app. Over the past year or so, Five has helped us build and launch a native app for iOS and Android. We rebuilt them from scratch. Five did the backend work and also the design of the customer experience. We launched the iOS version last May, for which we received an excellent review. Less than a month ago, we launched on Google Play, where we’re currently featured as a leading new app for language learning. We had delays on our side because we had to be careful in how we rolled it out to avoid disruptions in the school systems where the app is used.

We had a core team of about six people from Five. I was more exposed to those on the design side, but there was also a project manager and three or four developers on the backend. They have a very robust process which starts with the customer and the user experience. We do a lot of brainstorming and concept work around what that user experience is, and then we put those concepts in front of users for usability testing. Once we’re comfortable, we sign off on the user experience and then proceed to build and test as we go along. It has proved very beneficial, and our customers and external reviewers have reacted very positively to the user experience we delivered.

How did you come to work with Five?

We did a review of several providers. Five had done some work for a company that Rosetta Stone acquired, Fit Brains. The head of that business division thought very highly of Five and made the introduction. What really attracted us to Five was their customer-centric approach. They sit down, have a workshop, and test the experience with customers. We were very happy with the experiences they had built for Fit Brains.

What is the status of this engagement?

We began working with Five in October of 2015, and the project was completed in February of 2017.

RESULTS & FEEDBACK

Could you share any evidence that would demonstrate the productivity, quality of work, or the impact of the engagement?

They delivered quality work ahead of schedule and below budget. They truly are a partner, not just a vendor. There aren’t many companies you can say that about. They took the time to understand our business and our challenges. They were proactive in recommending business improvements, and they’ve worked with our team very closely. We include them in our internal meetings around the apps and our product planning. While we work with many companies, Five is one of the few that is integrated so tightly.

We surpassed our business projections for what we expected from the apps. The signup rates were much higher than expected; they probably doubled our expectations. We’ve been able to grow our user base in the app store. I think it has doubled since we launched the new app. We’ve generated through the app store probably double the amount of money than we had before. It’s been successful all around.

From a customer review perspective, our app is very highly reviewed. I think we’re at 4.6 or 4.7 stars out of 5. From a business economics side of things, it’s paid for itself quite handsomely.

How did Five perform from a project management standpoint?

Our project manager is exceptional. He works very closely and keeps a detailed schedule of everything that’s due on both sides. We have a lot of cross-coordination to make sure we’re tightly aligned. Project management is one of the strongest skills that Five brought to the table. I’m very pleased with how the project was managed.

What did you find most impressive about Five?

They’re a lot more than a vendor; Five truly is a partner. They took the time to understand our business. They feel the same ownership we feel around the product experience. They go above and beyond to build the best possible experience for our customers. Their employees sometimes even worked on their own time to improve things. They pushed to deliver more than we had asked for and made sure we had an exceptional user experience. The involvement of Luca, who runs Five, made sure that we were more than satisfied. They’ve over-delivered on everything we’ve asked for. Our product team has been exceptionally pleased with the work Five has done and views them as an extension of the team.

Are there any areas Five could improve?

I can’t think of any. They’ve surpassed our expectations all around. I’ve recommended Five to others, and I don’t do that for many companies.

BACKGROUND

Introduce your business and what you do there.

We’re a platform technology focused on AI [artificial intelligence] for vision. We have a data exchange platform, and we quantify and model vision behavior. One way we do that is through apps. I’m the CEO and founder of the company.

OPPORTUNITY / CHALLENGE

What challenge were you trying to address with Five?

We needed to integrate a very complex technology into an application. A lot of that involved our software development kit.

SOLUTION

What was the scope of their involvement?

We created a gamified application with Five. The user plays games similar to Lumosity, and we’re able to get very powerful insights around the user’s vision behavior and performance. It was a big challenge to integrate some deep vision science into the interface. Our anchor partner is Vision Service Plan (VSP), which is the largest vision care provider in the country. They asked us to create a mobile app solution for them. It was a very professional approach, with Five doing a product design sprint in person in collaboration with VSP and ourselves. From that, we started on development. We’re currently focused on iOS and web apps. Five had two teams of developers, one for each platform. The app is going through beta testing right now. We did an alpha testing and made some changes based on the feedback received. We updated the UI [user interface], and now we’re releasing it internally to the VSP ecosystem. It’s not going to go directly to the consumer. It will be more on the corporate health and wellness side. VSP provides vision care for over 50,000 companies, so we’re going through partners that way.

How did you come to work with Five?

We were introduced through a mutual connection and then did some further research. We looked on Clutch for mobile app developers and reviewed about a dozen. We decided on Five for a number of reasons. They had done similar gamified applications, and they presented a good balance of both design and gaming expertise.

How much have you invested with Five?

We’ve invested $150,000–$175,000.

What is the status of this engagement?

The project began in March of 2016, and the relationship is ongoing.

RESULTS & FEEDBACK

Could you share any evidence that would demonstrate the productivity, quality of work, or the impact of the engagement?

I don’t have specific metrics. They’re very responsive, and they have the ability to communicate challenging problems. They’re reasonable in terms of cost and willing to negotiate in some areas. I got the sense that they were invested in the success of this app, rather than just wanting to get things done. They consider their work a representation of themselves and that was meaningful to us.

How did Five perform from a project management standpoint?

I have no complaints. We’ve worked with remote groups before and that was a nightmare. In contrast, these guys were very responsive. The time difference wasn’t much of a constraint. If they say they’re going to deliver at a certain time, they usually deliver at that time, if not before. We use Slack and JIRA for communication, and they share the code through GitHub.

What did you find most impressive about Five?

They’re willing to take risks. We’re introducing a new technology, and it was imperative that we get it fully functional. They were willing to take this on and work with us. I think that speaks to their innovative approach as a team. I’ve noticed that some of their new projects are also in that area. They’re very quick to take in new technologies and incorporate them into their business. I like that they’re early adopters, so they’re not just spinning out the same things. They put skin in the game, which set us at ease in terms of a potential long-term partnership. You want to work with people who would go to battle with you and are looking long-term, so they’re willing to sacrifice on the short-term. That sets them apart from others I’ve worked with in the past.

Are there any areas Five could improve?

Early on, we had some communication mismatch between teams. However, Five was very adaptive and responded with an effective solution with their project management team.

BACKGROUND

Please describe your organization.

PayMe is an online platform. It allows us to provide early-pay financing to suppliers around the globe. A supplier of goods for a large company can gain early financing for the invoicing raised with that company, from us. We do this primarily by integrating with the invoicing providers, offering an online portal to suppliers, on which they're able to request funding as and when they require. We are very different from invoice discounting or factoring companies in that we don't have any limits, there are no additional fees, and we provide funding on-demand. 

What is your position?

I am the chief technology officer of the company. I joined the company from its very beginning, and have been responsible for building our platform and taking it through various situations.

OPPORTUNITY / CHALLENGE

What business challenge were you trying to address with FIVE?

The original UI had been built based on our old platform, but, as we evolved our strategy, the site evolved as well, but not in the best way. I wanted to take an external viewpoint, find experienced people in terms of UI/UX and build a more user-friendly site which also worked well on tablets and smartphones. We wanted to make as much information available to the user as possible so that we could reduce calls to our customer center. The whole experience needed to be made easy for the supplier, and require as few clicks as possible.

SOLUTION

Please describe the scope of their involvement in greater detail.

FIVE worked on our initial site, and also revamped the UI and supplier user-experience. We're still in the middle of that implementation, so I couldn't say if we've hit our goals or not, but the design produced by FIVE is something that can achieve those goals.

How did you come to work with FIVE?

I have worked with FIVE for a number of years, since I was the IT director of an e-commerce business prior to my current position. I used them for some redesign work at that company, including the development of our responsive HTML5 site. I initially found FIVE through another contact in Croatia, who was working as an ERP and finance specialist and was helping my former company implement a new finance system. I asked him if he knew anyone in the app UI/UX space, and he put me in touch with FIVE's principal. I always take recommendations from good people.

Could you provide a sense of the size of this initiative in financial terms?

The cost of FIVE's work has been between $10,000 and $50,000.

RESULTS & FEEDBACK

Could you share any statistics or metrics from this engagement?

FIVE performed quite well with my previous company, back in 2010. We were an ecommerce business and had seen that the trend was moving towards mobile and tablet. We chose FIVE specifically because of their experience in this area, and ended up building a good solution. We could see this through the increased number of people transacting through that e-commerce platform. We did a lot of work on the checkout process of putting items into a basket and paying for them, so the login and purchase times were greatly reduced.

On our original platform, the big issue was easily and quickly registering suppliers, and having them transact through their phones. We were working with many countries which didn't have good broadband infrastructures in place, but did have mobile ones, so offering clients an alternative to spending time on their slow broadband connections was a big selling point for us.

The new UI/UX skin developed by FIVE provides a more definite sense that our product is solid. It's a much more matured offering, and it's a big departure from our previous version, not necessarily in functionality, but in terms of visuals and flow. The platform allows for many more permutations than were previously possible around the different legal aspects of the countries within which we operate. The skin gives us the ability to be more flexible, so that we can easily add in whatever quirks a certain jurisdiction has, without breaking up the flow too much.

How did FIVE perform from a project management standpoint?

We tried to make everything as simple as possible when it came to the communication between our teams. We used Slack, which worked well for communicating in real-time, compared to emails. We also used Google Docs and JIRA, so there were actually too many tools being used, in my opinion. Everyone on FIVE's team was dedicated to our work.

What distinguishes FIVE from other providers?

I've worked with FIVE across different domains and industries. Any partner will require some time to really understand concepts like invoice discounting and invoice factoring, but FIVE was always quick to pick up the key points of the business, and where a user might get stuck in the transaction process, whether we were working on different e-commerce models or anything else. There was never a situation where I needed to explain the same thing over and over again. FIVE's members put themselves in the shoes of our users.

Is there anything FIVE could have improved or done differently?

FIVE was strong in all the typical areas of this type of project. The work took a bit longer to complete, but that was down to me more than anyone else, since I didn't have the time to answer questions as promptly as I should have.

BACKGROUND

Introduce your business and what you do there.

The name of our company is Envision Experience. We deliver academic based summer camps to middle school and high school students held on the campuses of Ivy League or other prestigious universities. We serve about 26,000 students every summer, and we’ve been in business for just over 30 years.

I run the project marketing department. I do standard product marketing - 4Ps, go to market strategy, product positioning, and messaging. We work very closely with our creative team and our channel marketing teams to make sure that all campaigns that we have in the market ladder are up to what the most compelling points of our products are. The second arm of that is product development, this mobile app with Five being a great example of that. We also have new programs for our students as well, so we do market assessments to determine where we want to pivot our product portfolio and what that looks like.

OPPORTUNITY / CHALLENGE

What challenge were you trying to address with Five?

We were really behind the times since we didn’t have a mobile app. When I started, it was one of the first things that I was tasked to do. We have to have a mobile pool for our students. I had come from Rosetta Stone a couple of jobs prior where we had worked with Five. I reached out to them to build this mobile app because we have 25,000 - 26,000 students every summer going through these programs that are on the move on campuses. Obviously, it seems like a natural fit for a mobile app in terms of “Here’s your schedule, here are people that are speaking, here’s where you need to go and when, here’s a list of other students that are in the program with you, and links to their social network so you can connect with them following the program.” What we do lends itself pretty naturally to having a mobile app that is really a combination of utility and engagement to the customer.

SOLUTION

What was the scope of their involvement?

We engaged with them in January of this year. We’ve taken an iterative approach to the mobile app. We launched an MVP [minimum viable product] version in May that we piloted with a smaller group of our students to get their feedback. It had a schedule of the students’ program as well as a list of speakers and a list of other students that were in the program, and a pre-program checklist to help some of the stress and anxiety that students and parents feel in terms of preparing to go to a two-week long summer camp. We put everything a student would need to bring into a condensed checklist in the app to help streamline that process. We launched that and gathered feedback over the next month or so. We did an immediate additional design sprint where we added deeper social integration. We enabled students to build out profiles within the mobile app. We included more information outside of just the bio for speakers that were speaking. We fully launched that at the very end of July. By that point, there were about 1/3 of our students left to go through summer programs. We put the fully functional first generation candidate out into our customer environment at the end of July this summer. Since then, we have done another design sprint and we are continuing to iterate on the mobile app.

When we look at the core functionality - the utility and engagement that it provides to our customers on site - we are going to iterate on a few different things to provide deeper levels of engagement and make it more fun. We are going to port it onto Android platforms. It’s currently only available on iOS. What we’re actually really focusing on is to have something in the market around February or March that will pivot our model. It’s going to be much more of a customer acquisition base. It’s going to use personal assessments to help students identify their passion and identify their interests to match them up with a career path and give them milestones along the way that they can hit to achieve this career that we’ve matched them up with. One of those milestones is recommending that they attend one of our programs, in which case, as an existing customer, you’d be able to go into the first generation mobile experience that’s very much that portion of the mobile app. We’re looking to launch that in partnership with Five in February or March of next year.

How much have you invested with Five?

We have spent $75,000 to $100,000 for the first part.

RESULTS & FEEDBACK

Could you share any evidence that would demonstrate the productivity, quality of work, or the impact of the engagement?

Right away we had a 4.5-star rating in the app store, which is great especially considering this was an MVP candidate. We had about 900 or so daily active users. That’s really great considering it was a small population of our students that were using the mobile app this summer. We did survey our students about their mobile experience at the end of the summer - those that had actually used the mobile app. They all said it was extremely valuable to them. Some of the things we heard were having the schedule in the palm of their hand really alleviated stress while they were onsite because it enabled them to feel more comfortable in terms of where they needed to go and when they needed to be there. They loved building out their profile and looking at other students’ profiles. They said they use the mobile app to build relationships that would carry on after they left the program. We heard really great feedback from parents as to how useful that checklist was for them and their student when they were planning the arrival. It took a lot of the guess work out of what they needed to do and what they needed to bring. In general, we saw on average about a four to five improvement in MPS scores across our entire portfolio of summer programs this summer. While we can’t directly attribute it to the mobile app, but we’re more than certain that that had a hand in it.

How did Five perform from a project management standpoint?

One of the first things that struck me was their ability have such a deep understanding of our business. We have a lot of different programs that are targeted to very different student audiences within our portfolio. They spent a day talking to stakeholders and the next day they were ready to get down and get to work. I was expecting the onboarding process to take more time. I knew that in order for them to build a mobile app that would be powerful for our students they’d have to have a deeper understanding of our business. Their ability to achieve that level of understanding in a really short amount of time was critical to the success of this project. It was super impressive to me actually. There are new employees that work here that I’ve on-boarded which haven’t been able to take that much information in and make sense of it in such a short amount of time.

I love how they approach the product life cycle in general. They also approach things from a design perspective so that you’re constantly iterating on it. It’s not a stagnant product, but they say, “Here’s what we’re going to do at MVP. Here are our recommendations for design sprint one in terms of how we should add on this based on what we’re hearing from your business. Here’s a design sprint two - what we’d like to add based on what we’ve heard from your customers.” There’s a lot of companies that build these things that don’t take as much ownership of the success of the mobile app. Five focuses on delivering a final product and making sure that you’re constantly iterating on the product and changing it as the needs of the market change so that it’s powerful to the business. They truly partner with you which is something that I really appreciate.

In terms of project management skills, they work really hard to ensure that they meet key dates or that we stay on track. They push me sometimes. They’re really good at communicating deadlines, pushing themselves, and pushing you to stay on deadline. I really appreciate that because product development is only a small piece of what I do. I appreciate having a partner that keeps me honest and keeps me on track.

Are there any areas Five could improve?

I don’t think so. I’ve had such a great experience working with them so far. I can’t think of anything.

BACKGROUND

Introduce your business and what you do there.

We are the leader in the enterprise staffing software market space. We build software and CRMs [Customer Relationship Management solutions] for the staffing industry. We do the time sheeting, billing, and contract management for staffing companies. We also have onboarding in order to have staff companies’ onboard candidates, and we have VMS as well, which is vendor management software. That is to help staffing companies take a tool to their customers and let the customers put in their own requests directly into the system. It’s a model that’s very common in the staffing industry, everything is software oriented for staffing.

I am the Senior Vice President of Product and Product Delivery.

OPPORTUNITY / CHALLENGE

What challenge were you trying to address with Five?

As our customers began to take us beyond the US, there became a need to support them in other regions but also the need to have strong development talent in additional time zones to help provide coverage. The challenge of getting top talent is quite hard in Boston; it’s very competitive. Five addressed the need for coverage in Europe. They’ve been a great partner in helping us ramp the business as we grew. Our revenue has gone up quite dramatically, and with that comes lots of development needs.

SOLUTION

What was the scope of their involvement?

We look for full stack developers and more senior developers. In particular, our technology stack was based on C#. They’ve been able to attract an extremely talented group of folks with C# expertise, and they’re 100% embedded and work right alongside our folks in terms of scrum teams that are all one big global team as opposed to separate offshore support or something like that. In fact, they have a number of folks who have provided architectural leadership and have taken on some of the heftiest of projects including a march into providing multilingual, multicurrency, and localization capabilities. They drove the lead on that and accomplished our first phase to support the UK functionality - the scope necessary to enable a UK customer to have language relevant to their locale. They did that in about 5 ½ months. There are really strong players on that team.

How did you come to work with Five?

One of our co-founders is Croatian and was introduced through a mutual friend. It turned out that one of our senior folks within erecruit at the time had also worked with Five before at his prior company, and it seemed like a great fit. We got started with nine or ten resources right off the bat and have been growing ever since.

How much have you invested with Five?

We have invested $200,000. We started with nine or ten resources and they were full-time, working alongside our team.

What is the status of this engagement?

We’ve been working with them for two years.

RESULTS & FEEDBACK

Could you share any evidence that would demonstrate the productivity, quality of work, or the impact of the engagement?

The ability to get projects done with high quality, especially the multilingual architecture, in about five months is pretty remarkable. We have been doubling some of the metrics that are on our website since Five has been here. They’ve done some major architecture upgrades. There’s a growing ERP [enterprise resource planning] for the staffing industry. You always find things that need refactoring so they’ve dived right in and have helped us scale our performance to be many, many multiples of what it was when we first started. They’ve done a lot of heavy lifting and performance coding as a caching architecture - so a lot of really deep technical work as well as functional features. They’ve also come up with some really good designs for some of the search work that we’re doing. Five is known as an agency that does a lot of designs here in the US. We did not engage them for design work early on, it was just development augmentation. Now they have scrum masters and we also have a couple of folks that are doing design work. 

What did you find most impressive about Five?

The leaders of the company. I work most closely with Luca. He’s extremely knowledgeable about the industry and he’s certainly talented in leading the team and attracting talent. When I say we need to supplement, he can find great people on very short notice. He’s extremely responsive. I talk with him all the time. It works really well; I can’t say enough about him.

Are there any areas Five could improve?

We needed people and I got incredibly talented people almost overnight. It’s hard to beat that. It’s like flipping the light switch and people are there, and they do a great job and have a great culture. I don’t have anything they could improve, except they can market how great they are even more broadly. Everybody has HR topics in managing people and so forth. They do a great job of that if issues arise. I don’t have anything negative to say about how we’ve done business with them, they’re very transparent.

BACKGROUND

Introduce your business and what you do there.

We are a polling app around pop culture topics for millennials. I’m the Chief Executive Officer.

OPPORTUNITY / CHALLENGE

What challenge were you trying to address with Five?

We needed development.

SOLUTION

What was the scope of their involvement?

We were looking for development because we realized hiring people in-house is costlier since it adds to the overhead of things. It’s also hard to find qualified people. We were looking at agencies and we actually ended up finding Five through Clutch I think. We met a whole bunch of agencies in New York, and Five seemed to have the most experience on building consumer apps. That was a key reason why we worked with them. The app was for iOS, Android, and Windows.

How did you come to work with Five?

Before we contacted any agencies from Clutch, we ironed out a business requirement document with exactly what we needed to be built. We reached out to a whole bunch of agencies and we met them personally. Everyone sent proposals and Five, judging the agencies on certain criteria, had the best mix of both qualified engineers and experience in the consumer app space. They were able to manage expectations and the product well.

Before Five, we worked with a different agency that we found on Clutch as well.

How much have you invested with Five?

We’re between 10-50 employees. Per month we’re spending between $50,000 and $100,000. When we’re done it will be over $1 million.

What is the status of this engagement?

We’ve been working with them six months and this will continue for at least another year. It’s ongoing.

RESULTS & FEEDBACK

Could you share any evidence that would demonstrate the productivity, quality of work, or the impact of the engagement?

We’re privately funded, so we can’t disclose how many users we have. We used Five for development, the actual coding of the front and backend systems. Second was the design, and third is user testing.

What did you find most impressive about Five?

Their attention to detail. It was hard working with the other agency where the attention to detail wasn’t there. We would say one thing and it was like throwing something over the wall and getting something totally different back a week later. Five understood the space, and the communication is much better. Five has most of their engineers in Croatia. The first agency we worked with were entirely in New York, but communication with Five is a lot smoother.

Are there any areas Five could improve?

Not really. There’s a lot we wish we would’ve done differently. One was to do user tests before we start building product features out. We learned from Five to test those out with focus groups and then build it.

BACKGROUND

Please describe your organization.

We are a data intelligence and research firm. We specialize in hard to glean datasets and consumer insights. Our clients are usually using it to complement their own strategy or for their own business intelligence platform.

What is your position?

I head our engineering and technology development, and I’ve been working with Five as of April, 2016.

OPPORTUNITY / CHALLENGE

What business challenge were you trying to address with Five?

I would say there were three problems that we had to solve. The first was that we have a mobile presence and needed mobile application development. We just simply don’t have the manpower to fulfill this need with our own staff. As our development and our needs are becoming increasingly more oriented around the mobile space, our mobile development capacity hasn’t caught up.

The second thing that was a problem was just really understanding the evolution of development and operating system architectures in the mobile space. It’s a niche, and frankly, I don’t think many mobile developers understand what the differences between Android versions are or what the differences in architectures in iOS are. It’s hard to find developers that really understand the nuances and the capabilities of each operating system.

Then the third was a competency in mobile development that implied mastery or trust. If we are developing new mobile products or if we are engaging mobile users, even if we know how to write the code, there are all sorts of other user interaction activities that represent trust – outside of the technical space.

SOLUTION

How did you come to work with Five?

We looked at probably five other agencies that have a credible and well-known history in this space. All of them had strong references, Five included. We went through a bit of a process, meeting with their heads of technology, and the nuances between mobile architectures, trying to understand if they actually knew. That process vetted out or weeded out some of them. We looked at technical competencies, and at locality. We wanted a company that had a presence near our office. We’re located here in New York, so that excluded several of the other vendors.

Then, finally competing on price, Five did a couple of things that were, I would say different, in a long history of vendor selection and contract engagements. Five has won my personal trust with their pricing, and they were great about being upfront. There wasn’t a dent, and there wasn’t any hidden activity. Because we were a new client, they wanted our business, and they wanted us to earn each other’s trust. They were willing to be very creative with building a real partnership instead of a transaction. That ultimately won them the project hands down.

Could you provide a sense of the size of this initiative in financial terms?

I’d say this project was in the $60,000 to $100,000 range.

RESULTS & FEEDBACK

Could you share any statistics or metrics from this engagement?

Outside of the assured deliverable, Five treated our team like an extension to their own team on day one, and likewise, we did the same. We set up a Slack channel that we communicated on daily. We were incorporated into their JIRA tracking system, and we gave them access to our GitHub. That’s a cultural thing that is hard to pull off for a lot of companies, and it was effortless. I think because of that, we had a working prototype in two weeks. Around the one month mark, we were in the polishing phases and the execution stages of delivery, rollout, and launch. I mean, really, they were ahead of their estimated timeline, and even the “nice to have” features were incorporated because we were communicating effectively and because they knew their way around the project really well.

What distinguishes Five from other providers?

I’d say the communication and trust standout, whereas with other vendors, I think we’d be getting into a transactional relationship where it would be difficult to know if they were invested in our long-term success, and how that impacts our ability to spend more with them. We get a deliverable, and we go on our way. Five really understood our business model and helped to communicate new opportunities. We were communicating about where this product goes in future releases. It has been a true partnership, and it’s definitely a very healthy one.

Is there anything Five could have improved or done differently?

This is not a criticism of Five. In order for them to be successful, they do build a partnership, and there has to be an equal contribution to that. My company is growing very fast. Because of that, we don’t have enough people to dedicate all the time and energy in order to make sure that the project is successful. They’ve been great where they’ve stretched outside of what I would expect to be reasonable. We may have slowed them down because we didn’t get feedback on an iteration in time, but I would say they need you to be ready to be a part of a successful relationship. That, again, is pretty ambiguous, but what I’m saying is a partner engaging with Five should be ready to participate in the partnership. You need to be cognizant of deliverable timelines, or if Five has any clarifying questions, you can’t let those sit and languish for a week, and still have the expectation of a quick turnaround time on the final deliverable.

BACKGROUND

Please describe your organization.

My working relationship with Five was with my last company called Fit Brains. Fit Brains was one of the top two mobile brain training companies in the world. We had more than 15 million users.

What is your position?

I was the Founder and Chief Executive Officer of the company.

OPPORTUNITY / CHALLENGE

What business challenge were you trying to address with Five?

At that stage, we had a small internal team and we were looking to augment that team with a talented group that really understood mobile. We wanted a team that was focused only on mobile at the time. We really needed some help, not only on the development side but on the User Interface/ User Experience [UI/UX] pieces as well. We were really looking for a team to help take some initial stuff that we had built and help us to build on top of that.

SOLUTION

Please describe the scope of their involvement in greater detail.

My relationship with Five started with one test project, and that went really well. We expanded that and then we basically worked with them for five years over a number of projects. We had Fit Brains, which was an app targeted at adults, but we also worked with them on Fit Brains for Kids. We also did an Android product with Five. I subsequently sold the company to Rosetta Stone and post-acquisition continued to work with them on the Fit Brains product as well.

How did you come to work with Five?

I have a background in development in a distributor environment and overseas, I looked at 11 companies and built out an evaluation matrix because I knew what I was looking for. I narrowed my decision down to three companies and ended up selecting Five. I just really felt confident in their process. I also really liked some of the work that they had previously done.

Then I think for me, it was really the focus on execution. I felt comfortable that they were going to be able to execute in a timely manner as they put forward in the initial schedule. They were always strong on delivering on time, which allowed the relationship to grow and continue for five years.

Could you provide a sense of the size of this initiative in financial terms?

We had multiple projects going. We always had projects with them, so I can't remember the size of them in total but it was definitely over $100,000.

RESULTS & FEEDBACK

Could you share any statistics or metrics from this engagement?

What I would say is that at different points in the partnership we were looking for different things. Starting the relationship it was more development, and over time we'd lean on them more for design. We could always rely on Five when we needed help executing on whatever we needed to do. They’ve grown as an organization in terms of what they're offering. They're strong from both a development and a design aspect.

The company they have now is really impressive. They've always been strong but they’re great on building on existing capabilities; leveraging and gaining expertise and knowledge with all the different clients they've had over the years.

Is there anything Five could have improved or done differently?

I can't think of anything, but everybody has areas for improvement. I've worked with them for five years and I know them really well, any problem I had was addressed. From a strategic perspective, it is great that they now have a much bigger design team. I think they were limited in terms of the amount of people they had in that group and now it's expanded. I think they're putting a lot of emphasis on both sides now, not just the development side.