Dedicated Dev Team for Marketing Startup
- Web Development
- Confidential
- Quality
- 4.5
- Schedule
- 5.0
- Cost
- 5.0
- Willing to Refer
- 5.0
"...TkXel has also gained an understanding of our culture and environment."
- Advertising & marketing
- Seattle, Washington
- 1-10 Employees
- Phone Interview
- Verified
TkXel helped migrate a custom architecture that included e-commerce, search, browsing, and advertising functions. The project involved NodeJS, .NET, AngularJS, PHP, Java and Ruby.
Efficiency has increased because of the partnership with TkXel. The team was extremely accommodating, adjusting hours to suit the project and sending developers to work onsite and become familiar with the in-house team's needs. They deliver software of uniformly high quality and stability.
A Clutch analyst personally interviewed this client over the phone. Below is an edited transcript.
BACKGROUND
Please describe your organization.
We're a startup company.
What is your position?
I'm the chief technology officer.
OPPORTUNITY / CHALLENGE
What business challenge were you trying to address with TkXel?
In order to augment our developer team, I brought in TkXel based on our previous experience. They will help develop the core features of our product. I first engaged their services within my previous company, Groupon. I was the director of product development at the time. We acquired a number of companies in international countries in order to gain a presence within them. Every company that we acquired came with a different platform, tools, and website infrastructure. In order to make the process scalable, they were integrated within one of four different platforms with which we were working internationally. Our focus on the United States side was to build a unified architecture that could be broken up in such a way as to work within all our areas without them impacting one another. Many of our development resources were focused on this, and it would take a long time. Business was still active, so we needed advancement from a coupon side to a physical products side. In order to enable that, we hired companies that could run the operations underneath our desktops, so to speak. When I took over, my first priority was to bring everything under a secure umbrella within our coupon environment.
The biggest engagement was within the major countries in Europe. We hired TkXel in order to take over those platforms and expand them to our international countries.
SOLUTION
Please describe the scope of their involvement.
When they were originally brought in to our project for Groupon, we had a codebase running offsite for in-browser categorization features on top of certain websites, using public APIs [application programming interface]. I handed the code to them, along with our documentation and knowledge of what the codebase was. They brought their team and started looking at what the code was actually doing. I required that, before they started doing any development, the platform should be migrated to Groupon servers in order for us to have control of everything.
They did this quickly, only taking two weeks. We migrated everything and were productive enough in order to be able to change the architecture for the solution. The previous architecture implied copy/pasting the same solution for every country. TkXel built a single solution that used configuration files in order to run multiple countries. They determined how it should be built and did a marvelous job. We did not hear any complaints from the stakeholders within the countries for which we made the modification. The platform was kept up and running throughout the enhancement process.
During the engagement, they worked on implementing our changes in four countries, ultimately expanding their work to 26, during a two-year period. The solution not only provided a proper e-commerce experience with search, browsing, and merchandising capabilities, but could also run ads and campaigns for special occasions. They also handled any additional requirements on their own. We kept in touch with their project manager but, for the most part, their development team was interfacing with our stakeholders in Europe. They dug into their requests and rolled out the features required by each business.
We were working on a unified platform that was to be the base for all our company's operations. TkXel helped us with snippets of code as well as helping improve the performance of our application and doing testing. We didn't involve any contractors in the work done for our main platform.
The technologies they used were NodeJS on the front end, along with PHP and Ruby on Rails, depending on the country. The back-end portions were mostly Java. For our project with my current company, we work with .NET and AngularJS
How did you come to work with TkXel?
We evaluated multiple companies for offshore development. Our international stakeholders were based in Europe, Asia, and Latin America. We wanted a company in either India or Europe, which could deal with different time zones. I used to work with TkXel's CEO [Umair Javed] in the past, so I was familiar with his reputation. We underwent a request for proposal process with them and a number of other companies that we were familiar with. TkXel were not the cheapest option, but we were looking for someone we could also trust. We wanted their team to be independent, able to run things on their own.
Could you provide a sense of the size of this initiative in financial terms?
For the project within my current company, the budget is less than $20,000 per month. It's a fairly small undertaking.
What is the status of this engagement?
Our collaboration is ongoing.
RESULTS & FEEDBACK
Could you share any statistics or metrics from this engagement?
The work within my current company started earlier this month, so it's too soon to have significant feedback.
How did TkXel perform from a project management standpoint?
Because we're a small group, we've put parameters in place that enable us to manage them closely through a time and materials system. They had more independence within Groupon. What I appreciate about TkXel is that they're very flexible. They shift their work hours in order to accommodate our team. We have an overlap of about three hours within our workday. We have daily stand-up meetings as well as a sprint lining. We scope our requirements through JIRA. My main metric for evaluating their work is how consistent their estimates are, based on the same volume of work, and how much rework a solution they've delivered requires. It's important that what they produce matches the level of functionality and quality that was agreed upon in the original scope. Nothing in software development is ever going to be the same as previous work.
We're small enough not to require a suite of project management tools. We've used Basecamp in the past and, currently, we use JIRA and Slack for managing our collaboration.
What distinguishes TkXel from other providers?
I appreciate the fact that, even though they are an offshore company, in order to stimulate a project in its early stages, TkXel send their developers and lead partners onsite to work with our team and gain a familiarity with what our needs are. This has helped in getting our U.S. team comfortable with them, and TkXel has also gained an understanding of the culture and environment here. They can be more productive as a result.
RATINGS
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Quality
4.5Service & Deliverables
"It's hard to get the same level of quality from an offshore company as what we would receive from a developer in the same office as us. If I had to compare TkXel with any other offshore company though, I'd say they're above all the competition."
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Schedule
5.0On time / deadlines
"Estimation is something that requires a lot of time to master. TkXel do a good job of it."
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Cost
5.0Value / within estimates
-
Willing to Refer
5.0NPS