Could you share any evidence that would demonstrate the productivity, quality of work, or the impact of the engagement?
It’s not the type of application that's open to the general public, so traffic is not a good general indicator for us. We’re an enterprise software business so we only sell to people that are subscribed to our platform and can access it. The key indicator for me and the reason why I got them onboard was that I needed a specific project done with a definitive go-live date, which was this past week. Alty was very committed to my timeline and did a good job, even when it took ramping up from one to four developers. They found the resources to make it happen within my timeline while preserving a reasonable quality of work and a QA process. We did go live with that product a week ago. So far, it’s working.
How did Alty perform from a project management standpoint?
Alty fared well. When you get a firm and outsource this type of work offshore, there's a chance of language barriers and different time zones. Then it's very critical to see that there are a good workflow and project management discipline in place, which they had.
Alty had some tools they used in the past, and we have some of our own that we want to use. On the design side, we went to their choice of Basecamp for the project management. We used InVision for design feedback loops. On the engineering side, we have an infrastructure that we prefer—JIRA for project management and Bitbucket for code repository.
What did you find most impressive about Alty?
Alty's team takes pride in their work, which is very difficult to find. It's hard enough to find it in your own employees, so it's very hard to find outside. Their commitment is not just to a timeline or project tasks, but they're committed to doing things well. That's a big differentiator.
Are there any areas Alty could improve?
I've had a really good experience so far. For the types of things that we stumbled on, I wouldn't necessarily fault them for it because it's the function of getting things done with an offshore shop. There are many things that they don't have a cultural context for. They don't live here; they're not the average American, so they don't necessarily know the concepts that will resonate. It’s hard to expect a Ukrainian shop to have that native understanding of that. It was our role in this type of process is to be able to educate someone like them on our product, the environment in which we operate, the type of users that use our stuff, and the types of things they may think or care about.
It was also getting a rhythm of communication in place. Because we had a tight timeline, it was imperative for us to get people to build rapport quickly. That took some effort initially, but I think we got to a good phase quickly enough. We were working on a very tight timeline. We had three months to launch, and they made it happen.
The development team successfully completed the web app’s first version, with few changes to the code required, all of which were quickly implemented. They communicated well throughout the process and ensured the requirements were fully understood.