Perpetual

BACKGROUND

Introduce your business and what you do there.

I’m the director of product management at Star2Star Communications, a B2B communications company focused on software development for midmarket and enterprise customers.

OPPORTUNITY / CHALLENGE

What challenge were you trying to address with Perpetual?

We were looking for a new product in a newer product category that does video conferencing and working collaboration. And we also needed a redesign effort across all of our apps, as well as customer-facing administration services.

SOLUTION

What was the scope of their involvement?

We provided them with requirements and reference applications. Perpetual then did end-to-end UI/UX design, UX validation, and Figma design all based on requirements. The team also did UX acceptance and development cycles.

Most of the apps they built were web-based solutions for which they used JavaScript. On the portal side, the programming language they used was PHP. Additionally, they do reskinning work on mobile and desktop applications 

What is the team composition?

We have a main point of contact, and we also work with 3–5 designers or creative directors. 

How did you come to work with Perpetual?

We did an RFP process. 

How much have you invested with them?

So far, we’ve spent between $50,000–$100,000.

What is the status of this engagement?

Our engagement began in February 2020, and we’re still working with Perpetual.

RESULTS & FEEDBACK

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

At this point in time, we’re just getting into the development cycle. Anecdotally, the team was quick to understand our product, market, competition, and underlying value proposition.

How did Perpetual perform from a project management standpoint?

Perpetual has been able to adapt to our needs from a process standpoint and in terms of how we prefer certain deliverables. The team is actually ahead of schedule, and they’ve done a great job of managing the budget thus far.

They provide us with a line of sight in terms of the progress, which allows us to easily communicate that to the executive suite. We communicate via Slack and have daily meetings. We use a scrum model, so we have staff meetings on a daily basis.

The team also manages resources well and is able to target particular UX design resources for each category of effort. 

What did you find most impressive about them?

Perpetual has a good familiarity with communication technology.

Are there any areas they could improve?

Early on, I would’ve liked more inquiry-driven early strategies. The team could’ve also encouraged the target customer and provided quicker access to subject matter experts and then ensured faster knowledge transfer. This would’ve enhanced the experience for us.

BACKGROUND

Please describe your company and your position there.

I am a Project Manager at Flatrate Moving, New York’s largest moving company. We have been in operation since 1991.

OPPORTUNITY / CHALLENGE

For what projects/services did your company hire Perpetual?

We hired Perpetual in 2019 to redesign and rebuild our main website, www.flatrate.com. The old website design was outdated, had several technical and SEO issues.

What were your goals for this project?

Our goals for the project were to

1. Create a modern, user friendly, and helpful website for people who are looking to move
2. Ensure the new website improved our booking rate
3. Keep the existing website running, while updating to a brand new website
4. Maintain and improve search engine optimization on the project
5. Maintain a technically stable and reliable website, easy to maintain in the future.

SOLUTION

How did you select this vendor?

We had worked with their founder on a previous project.

Describe the project and the services they provided in detail.

They redesigned over 50 pages on our website, for desktop and mobile form factors. On the design side, they provided user experience research, interaction design, graphic design, web design and mobile design services.

Their design team also worked closely with their development team team to ensure what was being developed maintained high fidelity with the original design. On the development side, they provided front-end development for web and mobile, along with some back end development.

They also managed delivering code to our test website, and to our live website. They provide QA services to ensure the quality of what was delivered was maintained. They monitored search engine optimization performance and ensured results were equal to or better than competitors.

What was the team composition?

1 User Experience Designer 1 Front-End Engineer 1 Project Manager 1 Associate Designer 1 Product Architect

RESULTS & FEEDBACK

Can you share any information that demonstrates the impact that this project has had on your business?

The new website Perpetual built has helped our SEO performance . Pages load fast and work great on desktop and mobile.

How was project management arranged and how effective was it?

Project management was very efficient, we had daily catchup meetings where the Perpetual team shared latest designs, got inputs from us, got approvals and direction on next set of pages and priorities. They had a dedicated project manager, George, on the project who maintained a central project tracker, and what designs or other items were needed from our team. They delivered efficiently and on time.

What did you find most impressive about this company?

Their ability to take our ideas and translate them into beautiful designs and functioning pages. They are a cross-functional team who is up for different challenges that we bring to them, they take a very practical approach and they get things done for us.

Are there any areas for improvement?

None

BACKGROUND

Introduce your business and what you do there.

I’m the head, new platform capability management for the editorial department of a news and information services firm.

OPPORTUNITY / CHALLENGE

What challenge were you trying to address with Perpetual?

Initially, it was to fill in a gap surrounding UX. They’ve worked on a significant number of projects over the years. In addition to design, they’ve also done some development work and implementation for us as well.

SOLUTION

What was the scope of their involvement?

They’ve done a lot of different stuff for us. One of the first projects the did for us was mapping user journeys across all of our multimedia editorial tools. We were looking to bring a significant number of our tools together and create a new, combined workflow. We didn’t understand how people were using our services, so Perpetual interviewed users, documented workflows, and create a user journey. Then they put together prototypes and recommendations for a dashboard that would bring it all together. For the UX stuff, they used InVision.

Subsequently, they worked on a live video platform, processing and managing live video streams.

They also created wireframes, design, and clickable prototypes for the UI.

They determined specs for an automated text generation service that effectively takes structured data and outputs it in a text format. They also did the UI for that to simplify editorial content creation and streamline all of our legacy products as well.

Recently, they built a new online cloud text-editing tool. They’ve looked into integrating legal analytics into the automated templating service as well.

What is the team composition?

I’ve worked with Amish (CEO) and 3–4 different UX designers over the years. In our most recent project, there were two developers and two business analysts.

How did you come to work with Perpetual?

Amish used to be a contractor for our company. He was a product manager then. He came recommended, so we brought him back on as a contractor.

How much have you invested with them?

We’ve spent around $500,000.

What is the status of this engagement?

We started working together in April 2016 and the engagement is ongoing.

RESULTS & FEEDBACK

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

We keep working with them. From my perspective, they understand our business and can jump in quickly. They can hit the ground running, which is very valuable for us. The speed in turnaround is fantastic and they understand our limited budget. The team is responsive and dynamic. The quality is always very good.

How did Perpetual perform from a project management standpoint?

It’s excellent. Their communication is always really clear. I get regular reports on what’s happening. I don’t know what tools they use specifically on project management, but the information they provide is easily consumable. I look at spreadsheets of finance breakdowns and timelines. They’re also flexible and have used Jira when we request.

What did you find most impressive about them?

Their dynamic nature and how responsive they are truly sets them apart. They have a range of different strengths. Their UX is great, and I understand from my development colleagues that they’re reliable there as well.

Are there any areas they could improve?

Any feedback I’d give him would be on communication when pitching the company and isn’t a reflection of the quality of their work.

Do you have any advice for potential customers?

Be really clear about your requirements. They will give you the best quote they can, but the more information you can give them, the more accurate it will be.

BACKGROUND

Introduce your business and what you do there.

I’m the VP of product for Coleman Research, a primary research firm and expert network. We help investment management firms, consulting firms, and other companies with their primary research by putting them in touch with industry professionals, mainly as part of a one-on-one phone conversation.

We’ve recently begun offering a SaaS product that takes our expert relationship management (ERM) system and allows our clients or other institutions that are managing networks of people to use the same technology that we use.

OPPORTUNITY / CHALLENGE

What challenge were you trying to address with Perpetual?

We hired them to do design work for our platform.

SOLUTION

What was the scope of their involvement?

Perpetual took some very crude, basic streams that I had put together and turned them into a true product. They helped us through the different iterations of our ERM platform. Additionally, we also have different portals that customers of our SaaS platform use as well. 

They added functionality that allows experts, compliance officers, and analysts to interact with the platform. The team also revamped and redesigned our own internal applications that are used by clients. Perpetual did all of this UI design work using Sketch and Figma. 

What is the team composition?

Initially, we worked with two designers. When one of them left the company, we only worked with one designer. Amish (CEO) also served as the project manager, checking in from time to time. 

How did you come to work with Perpetual?

Our former CTO, who had worked with Amish in the past, came across them. Amish then came in and gave us a tour of the work that they had done. We liked their experience working with other financial institutions, the mockups that they had done for others, and their overall approach.

How much have you invested with them?

We worked together from November 2018–January 2020. There were a few months where, as our business priorities changed, we didn’t engage with them as much. 

What is the status of this engagement?

We spent approximately $150,000.

BACKGROUND

Introduce your business and what you do there.

I’m the head of innovation for a media organization. We produce news content that gets consumed by publishers and broadcasters.

OPPORTUNITY / CHALLENGE

What challenge were you trying to address with Perpetual?

We hired them to develop an internal tool for us. It will streamline the process of extracting information from our database to serve our clients faster and better.

SOLUTION

What was the scope of their involvement?

It’s a web-based application. They worked with Node.js and worked on the frontend development. They also used AWS for the content repository. They also provided UX design support and product management support. Then we did a little debugging for deployment.

What is the team composition?

There were six people on their side who worked on our project.

How did you come to work with Perpetual?

We’ve worked with them on a few other projects within our broader organization.

What is the status of this engagement?

We started working together in November 2019 and development lasted from January–April 2020.

RESULTS & FEEDBACK

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

We did our own testing and validation, and we’re pleased with the outcome Overall, they were really good.

How did Perpetual perform from a project management standpoint?

They stayed on track in terms of budget and timelines. They were really responsive as well.

What did you find most impressive about them?

They’re very professional and quick to respond. They’re also very agile in their development approach, so when requirements changed, they were flexible and accommodating. They’re also very good at hitting target estimates.

Are there any areas they could improve?

I don’t have any comments on that.

Do you have any advice for potential customers?

Have a clear strategy on the things you’re trying to achieve. Be able to communicate your user-persona and user requirements well. Especially, if there are any changes, communicate early and often.

BACKGROUND

Introduce your business and what you do there.

I’m a senior director in the editorial news technology department for Thomson Reuters, a news company.

OPPORTUNITY / CHALLENGE

What challenge were you trying to address with Perpetual?

We hired them to do build a bigger platform. There were a few pieces that were needed within the scope of the work. They built our initial platform previously.

SOLUTION

What was the scope of their involvement?

This project involved adding extensions to the platform, expanding it. They onboarded content in a way to become part of the overall platform. Once the content was there, they put together our automation platform. To do that, they took our natural language templates and allowed the content to be bound so news articles could be rated automatically. 

They also worked with many technologies including AWS, Node.js, Java, and React. Their team also supplied full-stack work, coding, testing, and coordinating with users to get requirements from them. They were involved in every step of the process.

What is the team composition?

There were three or four people that we interacted with.

How did you come to work with Perpetual?

The company initially began working with them before I was here. They've done many projects with us.

What is the status of this engagement?

We worked together from October 2019 to March 2020.

RESULTS & FEEDBACK

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

We tracked progress through weekly calls. With regard to end-to-end delivery, they onboarded the content and pulled together some automation storage examples. We were happy with what they delivered.

How did Perpetual perform from a project management standpoint?

They did a great job. They’re dependable and able to work independently. Being familiar with our company and our platform reduced the amount of input from our IT team. We used Jira and had weekly calls to discuss progress and what should be changed before the next call.

What did you find most impressive about them?

They’re able to translate user requirements into software requirements, and they understand our platform well. They never made money the focus of our discussions. Overall, they bring in technically talented people and upscale as needed to deliver.

Are there any areas they could improve?

I can’t think of anything.

Do you have any advice for potential customers?

They know what they’re doing and you can trust them. Give them space to be creative and bring back solutions to you. Look beyond the cost because they do good work.

BACKGROUND

Please describe your company and your position there.

I am the Founder of DogStays, a marketplace for dog parents and dog sitters. We are based in Luxembourg (EU) and provide a platform to ensure high-quality dog-sitting/ boarding services for dog parents.

OPPORTUNITY / CHALLENGE

For what projects/services did your company hire Perpetual?

I hired Perpetual in Feb 2019 to provide Product and Technology Advisory services for my team. This was a 12 month engagement to help me plan and build out the Dogstays Marketplace platform from ground up (current MVP is live at https://www.dogstays.lu/, marketplace platform due to launch in Summer 2020).

What were your goals for this project?

I was seeking Product and Technology advisory and guidance on building out an MVP version of our marketplace platform. We needed someone to help define our technology roadmap, figure out the best process and team to implement the project efficiently and fit within our limited budget. Our main goal was to put a solid technical foundation in place to build out our platform. I also needed hands on support on my current site (dogstays.lu) to help optimize my daily tasks in running the business. One of the key items we needed support in the new platform was to conduct tech discovery on a third party scheduling/booking tool to allow Dog Owners to be able to easily book their Dog Sitter based on their location + available time slots vs manually performing these tasks on a daily basis.

SOLUTION

How did you select this vendor?

I was referred to Perpetual by a common friend who had worked with them before.

Describe the project and the services they provided in detail.

- They helped carve out a Technology Roadmap for my product building and scaling the platform. - They provided me information on “the how” to implement features, what open source tools we could leverage/ reuse, provide high level estimation/tech complexity against each feature. - Technical Discovery of booking/scheduling tools, open source e-commerce and CMS packages for the platform. Defining architecture, technical stack and appropriate cloud hosting. - Contribute towards budget planning for platform build and selection of third party vendor.

What was the team composition?

1 Tech Advisor available part time for 6 months. 1 Product Manager part time for 2 months

RESULTS & FEEDBACK

Can you share any information that demonstrates the impact that this project has had on your business?

Perpetual team helped me understand the cost and effort of building the marketplace platform and were able to identify the technology challenges and risks which have been invaluable to me in implementation of the platform. They were able to define the technology roadmap to align with my business priorities which was great! The technical recommendations they made have positioned us well to build out the next set of features on our platform.

How was project management arranged and how effective was it?

Very efficient, we had regular meetings - status was discussed in the meeting along with blockers/priorities. They provided me detailed information on the status of items and any blockers that arose during the project.

What did you find most impressive about this company?

Perpetual team has provided me the guidance and engineering best practices across people, process and tech - helping me find the right team, setup a lean/agile process and building our platform on a modern technology stack. The team has been very diligent and thorough through the project timeline. They know technology really well and seem to quickly understand my pain points in running the business to provide appropriate solutions and industry standard tools. They seem to always ask the right questions and challenged my assumptions at times (patient enough to educate me on the tech when needed!) I would highly recommend this team to any other startups.

Are there any areas for improvement?

None

BACKGROUND

Introduce your business and what you do there.

I’m the product manager for a multinational financial services company with a range of desktop products, web products, and feeds. We’re primarily working on market data terminal type desktop products, focusing on a slice of content that those users are interested in. We provide quantitative and numeric data that involves news and broker research, focusing on ways to make it easier for users to consume.

OPPORTUNITY / CHALLENGE

What challenge were you trying to address with Perpetual?

The company grew in a time where we had the news app, the filings app, the events app with earnings transcript were held, and a broker research app. Any time there was an emergency, people asked where they had to go within the four areas.

I put together a cross-content searching app as a proof of concept (POC). Being a POC, it had usability perspective issues, so we needed someone to assist with UX design.

SOLUTION

What was the scope of their involvement?

The team at Perpetual helped with the strategy and UX of the platform. Amish (CEO, Perpetual) was familiar enough with the core visual signature that we were working with. Within that, I worked with him and one of his colleagues to figure out our users.

We were in the process of adding a new feature that revolved around the use of a knowledge graph. During the process, we were trying to figure out how to visualize and integrate it. We wanted to use the app as a way to showcase new technology and functionality. The app itself is a bit of a demo. Amish was trying to rationalize the entire workflow while adding new features at the same time.

Their team built clickable prototypes in InVision, and then I would use those as part of my documentation for the development team.

What is the team composition?

I worked with Amish and one other person that was facilitating the core implementation. Amish had a good background in working with these kinds of financial apps.

How did you come to work with Perpetual?

My boss, at the time, had worked with them before. I wasn’t part of the selection process.

What is the status of this engagement?

We began working together in early spring 2018, and it ended at the end of 2018.

RESULTS & FEEDBACK

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

I’ve been able to use pieces of the work to show other groups internally where we’re headed. I also had my own stuff in alpha and beta environments to show.

Amish was quick to turn everything around. Even though they had other projects going on, I didn’t find that inhibited their ability to deliver work to us. I never had to wait.

The trickiest part involved the knowledge graph. It’s hard to distill into a single view, so we were able to design it in a way where users could see what was important to them. People find this feature useful, along with our newly-designed landing page. There’s no way to assign revenue to it, but the usage has gone up three times over the last year.

How did Perpetual perform from a project management standpoint?

Their extensive use of InVision was excellent. The team at Perpetual introduced me to the tool as a way to communicate ideas. I could in and see updates.

What did you find most impressive about them?

Amish is an affable guy. We spent time together for a few weeks, which was nice.

Are there any areas they could improve?

I would’ve liked to break all the rules of the product to have something a bit more dynamic, but that’s not on them. It’s quite a straightjacket we were given. It was a good relationship all-in-all.

Do you have any advice for potential customers?

Their background in the financial sector helped me a lot. If you’re in that space, they’d be a go-to-place. I highly recommend them.

BACKGROUND

Please describe your company and your position there.

Design Bridge is a leading creative agency specialising in Brand and Design. My role as Creative Director is to oversee creative excellence across our clients here in North America.

OPPORTUNITY / CHALLENGE

For what projects/services did your company hire Perpetual?

Perpetual were hired to help realise the build and custom development of a Brand site, to be built in Ceros, for one of our major consumer goods clients.

What were your goals for this project?

Seamless integration of our creative vision within the constraints of the platform, as well as using the Perpetual teams knowledge of other platforms to better understand where custom code/dev could be explored and brought into Ceros.

SOLUTION

How did you select this vendor?

Straight away the team at Perpetual felt like a good fit from a cultural perspective. They were also more than happy to work collaboratively and join us for in-person sessions which is how we prefer to work with partners. Their knowledge of the industry and previous experience with this particular platform was also a big part of the decision process.

Describe the project and the services they provided in detail.

Perpetual advised and helped fine tune the design, then went on to build as well as bring in bespoke custom code into the final site. They were also a fantastic support with the project management of the project and also were more than happy to liaise with the internal client IT department as we migrated the site to their servers.

What was the team composition?

The team we dealt with regularly was made up of three people. But I believe a larger team may have been brought in at certain points along the way as like with most projects we had some busy moments getting ready for challenging client deadlines.

RESULTS & FEEDBACK

Can you share any information that demonstrates the impact that this project has had on your business?

Despite having to work around some stringent client IT issues, this piece of work, which is literally going live right now ,has been a game changer for our client. The scale and reach of this brand is enormous and it was crucial that this project was realised and launched successfully and ontime in order to inspire and educate the global brand and marketing divisions.

How was project management arranged and how effective was it?

The project management was very effective and throughout the project we were regularly kept up to date with Google Docs containing the status of each and every element.

What did you find most impressive about this company?

Having the team, who was actually working on this build, able to come in and spend time with our designers was a fantastic way to streamline this project both creatively and from a timings perspective. They were also very accommodating with additional rounds of feedback and always kept us up to date with what was going on at their end. I also felt a genuine excitement from the Perpetual team about working with Design Bridge on this one which is always nice.

Are there any areas for improvement?

Nothing major as the project has been pretty smooth for the most part. My only area for improvement would be in those initial meetings I think we could have all been clearer about licensing and software restrictions.

BACKGROUND

Introduce your business and what you do there.

I’m the founder of a design agency.

OPPORTUNITY / CHALLENGE

What challenge were you trying to address with Perpetual?

We normally do our design and development in-house. Our team decided to get some outside help for development.

SOLUTION

What was the scope of their involvement?

We had a client request an interactive educational site from us. We did all the design in-house. When it was time for development, we went through our designs with their team and put together some of the technical requirements for the site. It was an agile development with weekly cycles. We collaborated on the project, implementing designs into their code using Prismic and React.

What is the team composition?

My friend was the main point of contact. He had a team that I communicated with over standups. It was very conversational—I knew people’s faces. It felt like we were all one team.

How did you come to work with Perpetual?

I’m friends with one of the co-founders because we worked together at another agency in the past. He was the fastest to respond to our RFP and understand our business goals. He had a very accurate approach to evaluate the amount of work necessary.

We felt comfortable with their ability to deliver from the beginning. It was the right decision from day one. While meeting the team, we went through their portfolio. It was very transparent and fluent. After we signed the contract, they put together all the milestones. Everything happened very smoothly.

How much have you invested with them?

We spent under $25,000.

What is the status of this engagement?

We worked together from November–December 2019.

RESULTS & FEEDBACK

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

We started seeing results pretty early in the United States. They were a huge help and very professional. From day one, we felt we were one team. All their work was spot on. With our combined experience, we understood how to address issues with interactivity and performance.

Aside from that, we just launched the project. The client is still updating the system for analytics. We don’t have any metrics yet.

How did Perpetual perform from a project management standpoint?

Since we worked in an agile process, it was very easy to iterate and keep the project going. The communication went very smoothly. We use Slack for daily communication and had standups three days each week.

On Fridays, we had a demo of how the website was progressing. It was a very well-crafted process. When we sent the feedback, they made changes quickly. They were always available.

What did you find most impressive about them?

They all have experience and know what they’re doing. The team has a good handle on all sorts of situations. Sometimes things need to be done fast, and they understood that. I felt they were part of our team.

Are there any areas they could improve?

One of their employees that was dedicated to the project left the company. They were very transparent and told us what was happening. They introduced the new team members that would be taking care of the project. It was a little nerve-wracking, but they did the right thing. We didn’t feel the impact of that.

Do you have any advice for potential customers?

I want to continue working with them and would definitely recommend them.