Spark Equation

BACKGROUND

Please describe your company and your position there.

Our staffing company is a force for good, providing custom workforce solutions on a national scale. At the heart of our business, we’re committed to breaking down barriers and helping people achieve great things. Since 1974, our focus has been on building opportunities and going the extra mile to help people overcome obstacles. Character, commitment, and passion are the cornerstones of our story as we seek to deliver exceptional workforce solutions across the nation.

We thrive on the knowledge that we’re making an impact every day. We’re committed to meeting the challenges of high-volume, large-scale contingent, and permanent workforce requirements within highly focused sectors across the nation. Our high-touch, best-in-class service model encompasses two integral components: Recruitment & Staffing and Employer of Record services. Our vision is to partner with clients, candidates, employees, and stakeholders to leverage sophisticated technology without sacrificing hands-on connections that give us a reason to get up every morning.

OPPORTUNITY / CHALLENGE

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

We wanted to update our existing system to be more agile, flexible, resilient, and scalable to help us continue to provide better user experiences and meet changing user demands. We needed to completely redesign our architecture, replace the old software, and update our system architecture to a micro-service model.

SOLUTION

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

Spark Equation came highly recommended from one of our channel partners.

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

Spark Equation helped us address all the challenges that arose with working with legacy code and made sure we kept a consistent experience for our active users during development. To meet our product goals, they analyzed our existing system and collected data from multiple sources, moved it into the data warehouse, organized it for optimal data retrieval, and made that data as straightforward as possible for near real-time analytics. They brought their knowledge and expertise in solving complex problems, and in turn allowed us to successfully introduce the company's proprietary onboarding and timekeeping HR platform.

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

In the 1st year, there were up to 10 members in various positions from Spark involved on the project. The team was able to flex in size over the duration of the project as needed.

RESULTS & FEEDBACK

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

One of the best measurable outcomes is user experience and cost benefits through workflow efficiencies. The platform is more than just an online HR portal. It is a mobile-optimized comprehensive solution that streamlines the entire employee experience from offer management, onboarding to time and expense entry, approval, and employee documentation. It’s meant to relieve the burden of having multiple sources to accelerate recruitment and hiring performance and reduce employment resources and costs. We are now able to fully focus on our mission and continue to provide custom workforce solutions that break down barriers and help people achieve great things.

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

We had a visual roadmap of our prioritized plans of where our product is headed. Everything was organized in a clear and straightforward way with quarterly milestones, metrics, and end goals. We always felt our communication channels were free-flowing and transparent. We used Jira for project management, Slack for communication, Confluence for code documentation, and Sentry for monitoring. In addition, our product manager and their project manager had bi-weekly sync-ups to ensure everything was on track, and the product was solving our customer's pains.

We had an efficient process in place to ensure all tickets and support items went through a workflow with all questions and concerns addressed so nothing was missed. This included estimations prior to development so we could budget properly per sprint. Bi-monthly sprint planning meetings were held to discuss the progress of the current sprint and what is to be implemented next sprint. The entire team is really responsive and stayed on top of each of their tasks. They push for good documentation, continuously keep all security practices up to date, and ensure quality is instilled into each deployment.

We started our project at the beginning of the pandemic and we had many worries about the road ahead, but their project management practices and overall engineering expertise brought us confidence in the decision we made and how we would excel during uncertain times.

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

We really appreciate how hands-on and committed they were to learning about the staffing and employment industry. This allowed them to really engage with us during our discovery phases to offer additional options and insights.

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

In our opinion, Slack does not work well for notifying clients of development releases. Utilizing another method for development release notifications and notes would be helpful.

BACKGROUND

Introduce your business and what you do there.

Livly is an online marketplace for multifamily housing. Our users are tenants, property managers, property owners, and vendors from outside the buildings. I’m the CTO of the company.

OPPORTUNITY / CHALLENGE

What challenge were you trying to address with Spark Equation?

We needed more flexibility and growth on the engineering resource side of things to develop our product in general.

SOLUTION

What was the scope of their involvement?

Most of our frontend technology is mobile—in Android and iOS. Spark Equation only helps us with the web and backend development of our platform. They mainly work on the backend side of things, but we do use them for the React web frontend.

What is the team composition?

The team size has fluctuated with time—I think there were six of them at peak. Vlad (CEO, Spark Equation) is our main point of contact. He’s located in their Chicago office, and the developers we work with are in Saint Petersburg, Russia. Vlad does an outstanding job as a liaison between the client and his developers, and the team engages on a technical level with our on-site developer. 

We have a stringent code review process that happens between developers. Vlad does a lot of liaising at the product level. For an offshore operation to run well, we need to specify our requirements clearly to guarantee that Spark Equation can deliver them on time and on target. From my perspective, the value Vlad brings to the table is both on the product side of things, as a communication liaison, and high-quality software development.

How did you come to work with Spark Equation?

I first heard about them 8–10 months ago in the context of another startup—one of their angel investors had a connection with Spark Equation. When I arrived, there was a drive to grow the engineering footprint so that we could get to market faster. We decided to explore two roads from an outsourcing standpoint: nearshore and offshore. 

We tested two outsourcing companies. The first was one I’ve had a relationship with for 20 years now, based in Chile. The other one was new to me: Spark Equation, in Russia. We worked with each to see which would work better. We tried two different models as well, including project-based. It turned out that Spark Equation did an excellent job, and we want to engage more with them in the foreseeable future.

How much have you invested with them?

We’ve spent around $80,000 on their services so far.

What is the status of this engagement?

We started working with Spark Equation around October 2019, and our collaboration is ongoing.

RESULTS & FEEDBACK

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

It’s been an extremely positive experience. The relationship started two months ago, and we already have a working product on the market that lets tenants post maintenance requests for their units. Property managers can then route those requests to the proper engineers on the field and get that entire workflow started. We also have backend integration with a property management system called Yardi. I value Spark Equation’s focus on delivering software to the market, no matter what, and with high quality.

How did Spark Equation perform from a project management standpoint?

Vlad plays a key role. He comes on-site to our office multiple times a week, sometimes just to be there in case we need him, and works on other things while he’s in the office. He participates in product management and planning with us. In addition to that, there’s also a project management liaison in Russia. I’m more familiar with the developers themselves, though, whom we interact with from a coding standpoint. 

Their communication is very solid. Vlad is an outstanding gentleman, and all the engineers we’re working with are great communicators in English. They have their own channel within our Slack and vice versa. Our company uses Zoom for remote conferencing. The developers are always available when we need them, and we make ourselves available for their questions. They’re very responsive in making development processes as high-quality as possible. We have pull request reviews on our side. I don’t think I’ve ever met with anyone from Spark Equation without video, which is important to me.

What did you find most impressive about them?

I’ve done a lot of outsourcing on both sides of the equation. What’s impressed me the most about Spark Equation is the technical expertise of the engineers assigned to our project. They have senior, high-performing engineers who write high-quality code and produce top-notch architectures.

Second, it’s the amount of effort that goes into delivering quality code. To me, it feels like the customer is very important to them, and I see that value delivered. They care a lot about what they’re doing.  

Are there any areas they could improve?

As a customer, I’d love it if Spark Equation had mobile software development resources and were open to a staff augmentation model in addition to project outsourcing. These are strategic features that I’d like to see, but that may not align with Vlad’s vision.

Do you have any advice for future clients of theirs?

Communication is paramount in any engagement, but even more so when the people aren’t working from the same office. It’s critical to make ourselves available, on the project setup and management side of things, to establish as seamless communication as possible.

It’s also important to either throw the ball across on the engineering side and let them deliver what they want to deliver. If there’s a software development process that you want them to adhere to—which generally implies pull requests and code reviews—make sure that your engineers are available and responsive to Spark Equation’s engineers.

BACKGROUND

Introduce your business and what you do there.

I’m the CTO of Shiftgig, a staffing tech company. We’re a SaaS platform that’s licensed by staffing agencies to connect contingency workers to short- and long-term work.

OPPORTUNITY / CHALLENGE

What challenge were you trying to address with Spark Equation?

We wanted to expand as a company and hone in on our mission to empower workers with choice and flexibility by developing our insights-driven mobile platform. Partnering with Spark Equation enabled us to solve technical challenges that arose during development without slowing down our teams. Their experience and expertise in building complex systems allowed us to successfully launch new features and gain competitive advantage.

SOLUTION

What was the scope of their involvement?

Spark Equation partnership was pivotal to our project. They’re really senior, good engineers who are able to jump into projects like they’re are in-house and completely transform them. We were confident in the implementations that the Spark team had done. Their involvement extended into designing solutions, assisting with product ownership and system architecture. 

What is the team composition?

Their team composition was structured with highly skilled software builders that truly brought additional value and technology expertise to the project. They had front-end engineers, backend engineers, a QA engineer, full-stack engineers, project managers, product owner, and a business consultant.

How did you come to work with Spark Equation?

We were introduced to them we acquired a product they were working with several years ago.

How much have you invested with them?

We've spent $200,000–$999,999.

What is the status of this engagement?

We started working together in February 2019, and the work is ongoing.

RESULTS & FEEDBACK

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

Their engineers are senior and so understand that issues arise during production and launch. They understand to watch for monitors and logging and jump on it; we don’t have to handhold them like I’ve experienced in the past.

They come up with plans and call out risky areas. That good sense of ownership makes my life easier and lets me focus on bigger business.

How did Spark Equation perform from a project management standpoint?

We have daily standups with their team and the project manager helps streamline communication. All their engineers are able to communicate really well.

They’re responsive and they understand the value of time, which makes them good at following up and not waiting on things. That’s important, especially with the time difference. They make things look easy and stay on top of them. To an extent, it pushes the team here to make quick and right decisions so we can move forward. They push for good documentation, which forces us to plan better than we would otherwise and ensures clarity.

What did you find most impressive about them?

We can trust them to do a really good job across the board. They’re not looking to just be contractors writing a lot of lines of code—they ask questions, do quality work, and understand. Their engineers are good, sharp, and competent, as well as very results-oriented.

We do two-way code reviews with them too because they’re good engineers and feel like an invested like a true partner. That’s not something I’ve seen in the past.

Are there any areas they could improve?

No, there’s nothing that I’d have them improve.

Do you have any advice for potential customers?

There’s no need to treat them like contractors; trust them like a part of your team and you’ll get the most out of that relationship. You can run with your project immediately.

BACKGROUND

Introduce your business and what you do there.

I am the CEO of Progress Retail. We are a learning experience platform for retailers. We offer proprietary educational courses in the areas of sales management, leadership, culture, organizational communication, and others.

OPPORTUNITY / CHALLENGE

What challenge were you trying to address with Spark Equation?

For several reasons, we were unhappy with the current state of our platform and decided that we needed a robust technological partner to help us improve the quality of what we were offering. We hoped that the upgrades would allow us to serve our existing clients better and help us gain new users.

SOLUTION

What was the scope of their involvement?

One of Spark Equation’s earliest moves was to migrate us from AWS to a Microsoft Azure cloud, which was accomplished seamlessly. In terms of our platform, the backend development work is mostly .NET-related, while our reporting and other frontend elements use Angular.

What is the team composition?

Most often, we are working with Vlad (CEO, Spark Equation) and Dmitry (Principal Software Engineer, Spark Equation). At times, we also interact with Nikolay (Regional Director of Engineering, Spark Equation) and a few mid-level developers.

How did you come to work with Spark Equation?

I learned of Spark Equation through a reference from another member of a Chicago-based technology incubator. He described his company’s experience with Spark Equation, and I engaged them shortly thereafter.

How much have you invested with them?

We’ve spent between $60,000–$75,000 to this point.

What is the status of this engagement?

Our engagement began in October 2018 and remains ongoing. We’re currently mapping out the next iteration of the platform.

RESULTS & FEEDBACK

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

In the past six months, we’ve doubled our business from the previous 12 months. That has a lot to do with us being more confident in what we’re selling and featuring in our demos. A significant amount of that success can be attributed to Spark Equation.  

How did Spark Equation perform from a project management standpoint?

Spark Equation is very structured and sound in their project management principles. Vlad makes an effort to convey the importance of quality communication to his team, and they follow through on those directions. Although we have Slack and Confluence arrangements, we primarily communicate through Jira.

What did you find most impressive about them?

I have more confidence in them than I did with any previous development partner. I can sleep soundly knowing that they are responsible with our product.

Are there any areas they could improve?

Their team could benefit from having additional frontend design resources, but I believe they are already making strides to hire more.

Do you have any advice for potential customers?

To maximize your time with the Spark Equation team and get your product racing, I wish our team would have spent more time on the user persona and story mapping work. Sometimes, you don’t know what you don’t know, and luckily the Spark Equation team has the adaptability and expertise to assist and lead in these areas in an extremely helpful way that saves time long term.