Owleks

BACKGROUND

Please describe your company and your position there.

The Paper Black company offers customers the opportunity to contact academic authors anonymously.

OPPORTUNITY / CHALLENGE

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

For this purpose Owleks supported us with the entire technical and graphical implementation. We needed a platform on which orders are created completely anonymously via live tracking. Both customers and authors should be able to communicate completely barrier-free, but not exchange personal information.

In addition to the technical implementation on the platform, a design of the really super implemented website also took place.

SOLUTION

How did you select Owleks and what were the deciding factors?

We chose Owleks because the communication as well as the procedures were very clearly scheduled in advance. This gave us very high confidence, as we could also control the budgeting very well.

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

Our website was designed through Wix. The design of the platform was done in parallel with the development of the website. This worked very well, so in the end we are very satisfied with the service.

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

We had the most contact with Roman at the beginning. In the course of the project, contact with Oleg increased significantly. We liked this very much, because Roman was able to communicate his product very well and Oleg was later responsible for the logical implementation on a technical level, which made communication much easier.

RESULTS & FEEDBACK

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

The technical and graphic implementation exceeded our expectations. We are really very satisfied!

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

Two projects were created via Slack. One is the platform, the other is the website. Besides Slack, I could reach Roman and Oleg at almost any time of the day if I had an open question or problem.

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

I like the open and transparent way of working and the flow of communication. Despite the physical distance, I always had the feeling that I knew what was happening.

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

For me, there are no suggestions for improvement at the moment.

BACKGROUND

Introduce your business and what you do there.

We are an IoT solutions provider in the field of industrial IoT, and we develop solutions for industrial science companies and governments.

I am one of the co-founders and I am responsible for talking with our clients and then translating what the client needs into a briefing for developers.

OPPORTUNITY / CHALLENGE

What challenge were you trying to address with Owlek?

We needed to scale our team because we didn't have enough resources and Owleks fit our tech stack. 

SOLUTION

What was the scope of their involvement?

The project is a platform for a ticketing system dedicated to complaints. They are responsible for a bigger part of the project via outsourced development work.

What is the team composition?

We have a project manager on our side and Owleks handles 99% of the development. They have two people working on it simultaneously.

How did you come to work with Owleks?

We had a partner who recommends various technologies, outsourcing partners, and agencies. He felt that Owleks might be a good fit. I don’t believe he’d worked with them before, but he talked to them and knew what they were going to do.

How much have you invested with them?

The cost has been around $20,000.

What is the status of this engagement?

We started working with them in March 2020 and the work is ongoing.

RESULTS & FEEDBACK

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

The project has been successful on our side as they’ve done what is needed. We are very happy with them and because of the impact that this project had, we will work with them in the future.

How did Owleks perform from a project management standpoint?

We communicate via Slack, but we have a joint workspace and the project management is done with Jira. They work with user stories, too. We also have feedback calls via Google Meet.

What did you find most impressive about them?

There are two things that are impressive about them. One is that when we have complex tasks they do, they research and find solutions on their own. They are effective in finding the right solutions, which is a good thing.

The other thing is that they are reliable. If we have any deadlines for our clients, they do their best to meet these deadlines. They are very flexible and committed to the project. We’re really happy about the communication, how they work, and the price.

Are there any areas they could improve?

Start with Jira for time tracking. We had separate time tracking solutions for the first couple of weeks. It was an easier process to start with but in the end, it took a bit longer for us to understand what they were working on.

Do you have any advice for potential customers?

Work together and cheer up from the beginning and this will be a straightforward cooperation.

BACKGROUND

Introduce your business and what you do there.

We’re developing a platform for information security management. We’re headquartered in Copenhagen, Denmark, and we have offices in Germany, and Oslo, Norway. Our platform helps users keep track of the documentation they need to have around the information flow of their companies, and ensure that they have fallback procedures in place for technical issues. 

We’re working against the ISO 27001, GDPR, and a couple of other standards. Simply said, we offer a CMS for compliance, which allows companies to prove to themselves, to auditors, and to customers that they’re in compliance with those standards. To some customers, that’s a necessity when dealing with other companies.  

OPPORTUNITY / CHALLENGE

What challenge were you trying to address with Owleks?

We had the ambition to build the third generation of our platform from scratch, centered around new logic for helping customers.

SOLUTION

What was the scope of their involvement?

Owleks came on board to work on the base platform for the new tool. They’re now starting to redevelop all the modules we had in place and needed to improve. Their main role is to provide frontend developers, followed by overseeing part of the project management and making recommendations on how to optimize the project. 

We have other freelancers working for us, and Owleks is the anchor of the project. We use their guidance to optimize our development processes and product management flow. We have a CTO and a product owner on the Copenhagen team and I have the commercial responsibility for most of our business, and I also oversee Owleks’ team in Ukraine.

They develop based on our specifications, but, since the only developer we have in Copenhagen is our CTO, Owleks also acts as an extension of our product development team. Though Owleks has very little to do with the backend and hosting, it’s on AWS. The frontend is built on C#, .NET, and React. 

What is the team composition?

There are three people from Owleks involved in the project, and we’re going to have four people, soon. Roman (Founder) is our main point of contact. We have two frontend developers, and we’ll have a tester come on board, chosen based on recommendations from Owleks.

How did you come to work with Owleks?

I’d known Roman for 10 years, and I was looking to move in a different direction with the setup we had when he founded the company. I reached out, and, luckily, they had the capacity, resources, and skills we needed to work with them. 

How much have you invested with them?

The cost so far is between $100,000–$250,000.

What is the status of this engagement?

We started negotiating in January 2020, but the development started in February 2020. Our collaboration is ongoing.

RESULTS & FEEDBACK

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

With Owleks, we’re simply getting a lot more value for money than we would with bigger outsourcing houses with hundreds or even thousands of developers onboard. Because of them, we have a real product team. 

They’re an extension of the Copenhagen office, which is exactly what I was looking for. They work closely with us and it’s valuable because we know what to trust.  

How did Owleks perform from a project management standpoint?

They’ve always delivered on time and within budget. We use Slack, Jira, and Confluence for tracking and communication. We have Skype and Google Hangouts calls on a daily basis.

Project management is the weak side of our entire project, but that’s on our shoulders. The QA person we’re getting on Owleks’ side will also become the scrum master, taking a high degree of responsibility for the entire scoping and estimation process. 

To begin with, we were asking them whether we should hire more developers to speed up the process, and, instead of just adding more power to production, Owleks had a good overview of how to save costs and generally improve our capacity. Their idea was to do it not by adding developers but by adding a better QA resource. 

I appreciate that they came back with an alternative that wasn’t more financially lucrative to them. Owleks has an honest approach to how they can best help us. I really look at them as our department in Ukraine, and not as an offshore setup that we buy hours from.

What did you find most impressive about them?

Owleks is by far the most transparent and engaged team I’ve worked with. I’ve been working with development companies in Lviv for 15 years, so I know what the price range and the labor market are like there.

In terms of culture, Eastern European teams aren’t always prepared to challenge their employer, but we need that in order to get the most out of this process. It’s generally a strength when developers share their ideas and inputs for approval, and Owleks does a good job on that. 

I could easily get that from established software houses in Lviv, but I’d probably have to pay for a project manager to do many things and there would generally be a large overhead.  When we transitioned to Owleks from our previous offshore setup, we had a 30% increase in labor while having a 20% decrease in price at the same time.

They’re very self-critical in the sense that they don’t try to hide anything or blame us for not delivering the right specs. They take a high level of responsibility, and they have a high level of integrity in general. They’re flexible, forthcoming, and proactive on both initiatives from our side and ideas that they have.

Are there any areas they could improve?

There’s always something to improve, but I don’t see anything at this point for Owleks to do better. The next level of improvement is in the way we work together, and that’s a responsibility we need to drive from our side. 

Do you have any advice for future clients of theirs?

Part of getting as far as we have now is based on the fact that Roman and I knew each other from the past. That kind of relationship always fast-tracks the trust in a project, and, once we get to a level of trust, we’ll start making quicker decisions. That gives us a lot of momentum in the project. If the client decides to trust them like we do, they’ll get a high return on their time spent.