TLVTech

BACKGROUND

Please describe your company and your position there.

The company I work for builds a product for developers that helps them find & fix security issues in their application, from the infrastructure to the actual code. At the time of the project I was a Senior Software Engineer which I was asked to lead the R&D for a very sensitive business partnership, which I've been given a budget to get contractors to help me with. Following this project success, I've been promoted to Engineering Manager.

OPPORTUNITY / CHALLENGE

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

For a business partnership with a very strategic partner, which required building an API integration between our product and theirs. The goals were to build a lean but robust first version of this integration out with a very tight schedule, as this partnership between companies was announced on several industry conferences & marketing events.

Another goal I personally had is to enable the rest of my team to continue focusing on other projects, while I "off-load" this project from them with a contractor working with me. Eventually, we were expected to build a beta version on a very tight schedule, which will later on became a solid foundation for the GA release that happens on May 2022.

SOLUTION

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

I reached to TLV-Tech after spending 1 month with another contractor company which didn't go well. I had to cut-off the other contractors one month into the project, while being very tight on schedule, this was a hard decision but in retrospect was the right one. Deciding factors was bringing in someone that can become part of the team very fast, work with me very closely in a tight feedback loop, and be fully committed.

I selected TLV-Tech after interviewing both the founder and two engineers, and getting the right feeling that they are up for the challenge, emphasizing to them that we're already 1 month in-delay and that it's going to be tight.

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

The scope included:

• Building an API endpoint on top of services. (Node, Typescript, Golang, Postgres)
• Building 2 new UI pages on top of our Application (VueJS).
• Building an analytics & metrics dashboard to track usage on top of our analytics stack (Grafana, Prometheus, Looker)
• Writing lots of unit & integration tests to cover all of the use-cases (Jest)
• Working with me & our product manager to iterate on fixing bugs and UX issues.
• Doing lots of manual integration tests on the partners platform when testing out the new integration.

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

I hired 1 Junior/Mid-level engineer from TLV tech. However, Daniel the co-founder was always available when I wanted us to catch-up and align.

RESULTS & FEEDBACK

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

• The Beta version was out on time.
• The conference announcements happened as expected.
• The feature was presented by our CPO in the company all-hands.
• The partnership relationship with this partner is growing strong and we're now working together.
• We started seeing adoption of the feature.
• We're getting ready for the GA release in May 2022.

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

We mainly use:

• Slack
• Jira
• Miro
• Github
• CircleCI

I was in charge of providing work to the contractor, building clarity around the project goals, and creating tickets for them. We worked on weekly sprints and we were on daily communication via the various platforms collaborating on making progress and unblocking stuff. We also had a shared Slack channel with the business partner to communicate with them.

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

Trust & Professional ethics! With a previous contractor company I worked with, it had to him cut-off due to lack of trust & professionalism. However, with TLV-Tech, from the first day the contractor was the first person to come to our office in the morning, TLVTech had tons of passion to get the work right and learn, he is genuinely a good guy. I could trust him and Daniel the co-founder, that they won't let me down.

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

Generally speaking, onboarding contractors is hard. It takes time to get them used to the company culture, to the team energy & flow, tech-stack, and processes. One friendly tip for improvement: Potentially having the contractor company ask in advance to learn about these things ahead of time, so they can prepare and help us make the onboarding as seamless as possible.