Aubergine Solutions

Please describe your company and your position there.

I am working as VP, Software Engineering at Serrala, responsible for Serrala's SAAS cloud product suite development and delivery. Serrala is a global financial automation and B2B payments software company creating more secure payment capabilities worldwide for enterprises of all sizes.

We are a leading fintech pushing the boundaries of finance software by integrating finance and treasury into one central ecosystem for corporate payments. Serrala is a fast-growing innovator with more than 2,800 global customers including more than 100 of the S&P500 companies and more than 700 employees.

For what projects/services did your company hire Aubergine Solutions ?

At Serrala we were at the start of our journey towards building our new age cloud native products for the Fintech B2B space and wanted a fresh, modern, intuitive and new age User experience for our product suite covering payments, cash, collections, accounts payable etc.

How did you select this vendor?

After carefully looking into the market and talking to multiple specialist UX design companies, we eventually zeroed down on Aubergine. We in the management including our CPO were very impressed by the reference work presented, though process of the team and command on the subject displayed during the evaluation meetings.

Describe the project in detail and walk through the stages of the project.

Aubergine followed a very methodical approach divided into 4 parts as follows:

• Discover - During this phase Aubergine team had intensive meetings with our product engineering and management teams to understand the domain and the Serrala product lines. This was followed up with more meetings where multiple demos were done with respective Serrala product teams demoing the same legacy products from on-premise side, helping the team to go deeper in the domain and products. Based on the above knowledge and after conducting intensive research and relevant information on Serrala's competitors
• Define - In this phase Aubergine team started worked on the Concept Diagram, Information architecture, Scalable Design system and framework for entire product suite which basically explored the visual language based on initial key wireframes. This was intensively involved phase as well between Aubergine and Serrala project teams.
• Design - In this phase we started seeing the delivery of workflows, wireframes, visuals, interactions, specifications and responsive views.
• Test - Final phase where quality and usability of the designs were verified and accepted by Serrala.

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

We were working directly with UX design head, a senior UX designer and UX designer. So basically a team of 3 people.

Can you share any outcomes from the project that demonstrate progress or success?

We're pleased with deliverables from their team and outcome was bang on of what we expected to acheive. The designs were immediately taken up for development by our teams and the first demos of our products in our annual user conference that year created a huge positive impact of our upcoming cloud products.

Customer feedback was highly encouraging and allowed Serrala to create the desired big impact. Since then the design has been incorporated and implemented for multiple products in the suite and the feedbacks have been consistently great from customer community.

How effective was the workflow between your team and theirs?

Very effective, the communication was super easy and the Serrala project team never felt like they were working with an outside vendor. They took continuous feedback and were very patient to hear even the minutest of our concerns over the multiple design iterations. It showed how invested they were into getting us what we wanted from the outcome.

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

Aubergine teams product design thinking was exemplary and highly appreciated by one and all in Serrala teams. Also the process flow and deliverables were very professional and world class.

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

Dont have any actually, we just loved the team and the overall collaboration.

Introduce your business and what you do there.

I’m the SVP of Product of Cubii, a wellness and fitness company. We have mobile apps that connect to physical exercise equipment via Bluetooth.

What challenges were you trying to address with Aubergine Solutions?

We needed a dedicated software engineering provider.

What was the scope of their involvement?

Aubergine Solutions has been our software partner since our company started; they’ve managed our software environment, built our mobile apps, designed our platforms, and maintained our products. 

Regarding the process, they provide visual mock-ups and wireframes for the UX to start every development sprint — their team has robust design support through Figma to ensure that it is safe to invest in the development of each product. In terms of technologies, they’ve used the RDF database, Redshift, Kotlin, Swift, Sentry, PagerDuty, and AWS.

About features on the app, the product allows users to track their historical progress, search for friends, message them directly, have groups to chat and rank workout performance in a leaderboard, watch videos, and try out new wellness habits challenges we post.

What was the team composition? 

We’ve worked with around 15 members of Aubergine Solutions’ team, but they’re flexible on adapting their crew depending on our needs. Nonetheless, their engineering manager is our main point of contact.

How did you come to work with Aubergine Solutions?

They were already working with us when I took my current position, but I know that our company’s founder got connected to Aubergine Solutions’ founder.

How much have you invested in them?

So far, we’ve spent $1 million–$5 million with them.

What is the status of this engagement?

We started working together in January 2014, and the engagement is ongoing.

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

Aubergine Solutions’ work has been instrumental in helping us reach about 130,000 app downloads between iOS and Android, along with 25,000 monthly active users. These metrics are great results for a company our size. Moreover, our apps work well and have features that our competitors don’t offer, distinguishing our products from others in the market.

How did Aubergine Solutions perform from a project management standpoint?

Project management is great; we use Scrum, and Aubergine Solutions is always transparent, collaborative, understanding of our needs, flexible, and good at speaking English. Regarding tools and communication, we use Jira, Microsoft Teams, Slack, and Google Suite.

What did you find most impressive about them?

Aubergine Solutions has been supportive and understanding of our challenges as a small company. They adjust the team to our budget whenever we need to and always have our back from a business perspective.

From a technical standpoint, we’re delighted with our proprietary content platform — it's a great product to have among our offerings.

Are there any areas they could improve?

I’m delighted with them as a partner, but they could ensure that some junior team members are more proactive, vocal, and confident in sharing their ideas.

Do you have any advice for potential customers?

Treat them like members of your team rather than an outside partner — that is very important. Moreover, do your roadmap planning and scrum with them.

Please describe your company and your position there.

I am the Vice President of Products at Raapid.ai, a Healthcare Technology Company powered by AI/ML/NLP technologies, based in Kentucky, USA and Ahmedabad, India.

For what projects/services did your company hire Aubergine Solutions ?

We hired Aubergine Solutions for UX/UI Design projects for our web-based software focused on Healthcare Risk Adjustment Coding & Auditing Solutions.

How did you select this vendor?

We know Aubergine Solutions for many years. We worked together in the past as well for a few projects. Still we have started with a fresh & open minded perspective when we were searching for UX/UI design partner for our new project, we have considered the healthcare domain understanding, grasping the product requirements, cost and timeline, flexibility, deliverables in mind, and finally selected this vendor.

Describe the project in detail and walk through the stages of the project.

The web-based software is for Medical Coders to process the medical documents to identify the chronic conditions of the patient based on evidence, and it will help the Medical Coders & Auditors to find the Risk Adjustment Factor Score of the patient efficiently, accurately, and quickly. The vendor team had requirement understanding sessions with us, gathered input from actual users within our team, relevant information for general functions.

They broke down into different phases for deliverables, which are aligned with our development plan. Came up with information architecture, preliminary design, discussions & feedback sessions, deliverables, review sessions, actual deliverables, review after implementation, etc.

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

3. Lead designer, senior designer, junior designer.

Can you share any outcomes from the project that demonstrate progress or success?

We were pleased with their UI/UX design output for three phases, which aligned with our development plan. We were able to run the design of next phase, and the development of current phase in parallel (after initial design phase), which aligned for our overall product deliverables. We were able to show some of the static screens while we were developing with potential users (internal & external), consultants to get their feedback and input.

We planned this project to build more features on top of the basic features, so that we could reuse a lot of previous phase features, which helped them for design as well as us for development.

How effective was the workflow between your team and theirs?

It was very effective. The lead designer was very easy to communicate with. They used to send a weekly status update, and we also used to have a two scheduled meetings per week and adhoc meetings as needed with the entire team. We also established a Google Chat communication platform to exchange information, Q&A, clarification, in addition to emails, meetings, Figma tool, etc.

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

Their understanding of Healthcare domain, grasping requirements & approaching from user personas perspective, reuse components as much as possible, flexible & open for comments & feedback, following design principles.

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

Nothing much, but as a team both sides need to improve the team communication & addressing the review findings.

Please describe your company and your position there.

My company focuses on automating and easing burden of managing short term rentals through a software automation suite. I am the CTO and Cofounder of the company

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

We had an existing mobile apps for iOS and Android that simply weren't aligned correctly. The previous developers we used to create these apps unfortunately didn't live up to our expectations. We were looking to consolidate our mobile app into a single solution to ease changes and updates. We were open to using either Flutter or React as the solution.

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

We interviewed 6-7 different development firms. We were most impressed with how Aubergine handled the interview process and followed up with a detailed solution on how they would solve our problem

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

Rewriting an existing app is never easy. I was really impressed with how the team handled exploring all of the APIs the app used, carefully documenting things end-to-end. Demonstrating progress along the way and quickly incorporating feedback provided into the design.

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

We had a scrum master and several developers assigned to the project. The scrum master also really acted as the project manager.

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

We are closing in on full app delivery. Again, I have to iterate how impressed I have been with the team meeting milestones, tracking progress, and displaying and releasing test builds to measure success and provide feedback.

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

Originally, I had thought there would too many Scrum based meetings involved in the scope of the project. After about a month of seeing how the team communicates, I realized how well groomed and focused they were by having these meetings. The team adapted to a tool I liked to use and provided constant and consistent updates. In previous experiences, lack of communication has been a problem for me.

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

Attention to detail. I am incredibly impressed with the organization of the team and how they flow together to get the job complete. I would 100% recommend them to anyone.

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

It is extremely hard to nitpick Aubergine. Compared to teams I have used in the past, I have only been impressed.

Introduce your business and what you do there.

I’m the CTO of a company called Atheer, a B2B software company that focuses on delivering software solutions to large industries and enterprises.

What challenge were you trying to address with Aubergine Solutions?

We were looking to elevate our customers’ experience, so we needed someone to provide us with UI/UX design and development. 

What was the scope of their involvement?

Aubergine Solutions provided us with in-depth UI/UX design and technical support to improve the users’ capabilities to write their own applications.

They utilized Figma as their primary design tool and other collaboration software such as Zoom and Google Meet.

What is the team composition?

We mostly collaborated with a senior product designer and two other product designers.

How did you come to work with Aubergine Solutions?

I’ve already established a previous working relationship with Aubergine Solutions from past projects.

How much have you invested with them?

We invested about $50,000.

What is the status of this engagement?

We worked together from February–July 2022.

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

I’m quite satisfied with our partnership with Aubergine Solutions and the products they delivered. They were patient, listened to our challenges, and were very productive and open when it came to discussing the project.

How did Aubergine Solutions perform from a project management standpoint?

They exceeded our expectations regarding their approach to project management.

What did you find most impressive about them?

We were impressed with their development expertise and design principles.

Are there any areas they could improve?

I can’t think of anything they need to improve on since I was quite happy with our engagement.

Do you have any advice for potential customers?

I would advise you to be clear with your vision so they can fully focus on identifying solutions for your problems.

Introduce your business and what you do there.

I’m the founder and CEO of a software company.

What challenge were you trying to address with Aubergine Solutions?

We needed help with staff augmentation and development. We had complex topics, so it was hard to find talent in the marketplace that could build products for the specific domain we were looking at.

What was the scope of their involvement?

We hired Aubergine Solutions to build products. They started as staff augmentation but slowly evolved to become the core team. Initially, they had a process of key questions and specifications about the product. We spent time understanding the scope, existing architecture, and what needed to be done. They focused on this for the first two weeks of the engagement; then, they started coding and building software.

We mainly use Node.js and React as key languages. Also, we’re deployed in AWS.

What is the team composition?

We have two senior engineers, one junior engineer, a QA engineer, and an account manager.

How did you come to work with Aubergine Solutions?

They were referred. A friend in my network highly recommended them and got me in touch with their leadership team. They quickly set up a team according to our needs, and we immediately started working. We were very impressed by how meticulously organized they were.

What is the status of this engagement?

We started working together in June 2021, and our relationship is ongoing.

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

We planned the launch for the end of the year, and we launched on time. They have a 100% completion rate; they’ve never missed a deadline. Overall, they know how to build products using best practices and processes. They move mountains to make things happen; we’ve been extremely impressed.

How did Aubergine Solutions perform from a project management standpoint?

They’ve brought structure and organization into our process. How they run sprints, do reviews, capture development priorities, and manage the agile process is structured from the get-go. We’ve been very impressed with them; every founder needs that organizational structure, especially a non-technical founder like me. Even though I lack the technical skills and transparency, having a managerial process where we discuss all the issues, priorities, and action plans really helps to make progress.

Also, they’re always on deadline and within budget. If there are any changes, we will have an appropriate discussion. All in all, it has been an incredible partnership. They always find ways to satisfy us, and the leadership team is very thoughtful.

We use Jira, GitLab, and Microsoft Azure. On the other hand, we mostly communicate through Slack, emails, and Teams.

What did you find most impressive about them?

They have very talented people and are highly organized. Their processes and planning are what really distinguish them. They have a modern approach to building products. The founders have a history of building in Silicon Valley, so they’ve turned their agile way of building into a philosophy for the whole company. They meticulously teach it and educate their people so everything is done the same way.

Are there any areas they could improve?

Finding talent and bringing them on board is challenging. If we need someone, we must plan ahead and let them know. They can’t find that person in a day, so it’s not fair to say they could improve that. However, I wish we could just bring in someone immediately.

Do you have any advice for potential customers?

Follow their lead and their processes. Share as much as possible early on and carve out the time. You can’t expect a team just to come in and be productive in a week; it’s unrealistic. Also, invest the right amount of resources, provide the input, work with them, and make them part of the team. Don’t treat them as an outsourced team — if you give them enough attention, they’ll move things quickly. Beyond one month, you’ll see extreme productivity. Just commit to it and you’ll be rewarded.

Introduce your business and what you do there. 

I'm the director of a startup company with a meditation platform. 

What challenge were you trying to address with Aubergine Solutions?

I needed someone to develop an application.

What was the scope of their involvement?

Aubergine Solutions has built our mobile application for iOS and Android using Flutter. I provided them with the entire UI design and gave them a detailed set of requirements. From there, the team used the UI to code the application. The app is in the meditation space, and its features include community functionality and content. Currently, I'm doing acceptance testing. After that, Aubergine Solutions will handle deployment.

What is the team composition?

We've worked with a senior software developer, two software developers, two QA people, and two backend developers.

How did you come to work with Aubergine Solutions?

I found them while looking for companies online.

How much have you invested in them?

We've spent around $50,000.

What is the status of this engagement?

I started working with them in late 2021, and the engagement is ongoing.

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

Something unique about Aubergine Solutions is that the senior software developer is also the project manager. Most software development companies have a separate project manager who isn’t technical and ends up being a middleman. That setup isn’t ideal when working with smaller companies and sole entrepreneurs because the project manager can become the bottleneck; they have to convey the client’s message to the developer and vice versa, which doesn’t always work. Since I’m working directly with the senior software developer, the process has been a lot more efficient for this project.

Additionally, I could speak directly with the CEO during the initial phases of the project, which clients don’t get with large software companies. Although the CEO wasn’t involved in all the nitty-gritty details, I knew I could go to him if I had any issues. He has jumped in to discuss the project and ask how it’s going. Having the CEO involved has given me that added peace of mind that I’m in safe hands.

Like any project, we’ve had a few issues; we didn’t stick to the original schedule, and there were some resource changes with new people who jumped into the project. However, these changes haven’t caused any problems, and I don’t mind the delay because I was getting all the additional input from the developers. I’ve stuck with Aubergine Solutions because they know what they’re doing and are fully committed and involved.

How did Aubergine Solutions perform from a project management standpoint?

The senior software developer is also the project manager, and she’s very organized. They use Jira for project management, and during development, the whole project was mapped out there, so I knew who was working on what. In terms of communication, I would have a call with them every week through Google Meet during development, and we used Slack for questions or doubts, where I could reply fairly quickly. We used GitLab for the code.

Although we’ve had a delay, communication hasn’t been an issue. Overall, Aubergine Solutions is significantly better at project management than some of the other companies I’ve worked with.

What did you find most impressive about them?

Aubergine Solutions’ software developers try and think like the end user, which is rare. In most companies, developers work towards the specification, and that’s all they care about, without thinking about the end user.

Meanwhile, the Aubergine Solutions team puts themselves in the user’s position, so they come back with little tweaks and ideas to make things easier for the customer. That feedback and suggestions from the developers have been helpful because I’m doing this independently and don’t have a big design team. That approach has also helped me identify some minor issues I hadn’t spotted.

Are there any areas they could improve?

There’s always room for improvement; in this case, they didn’t deliver the app on time, so it would have been nice to have a more realistic timeline. That never happens with development, though. Although most projects are delayed, the less delay, the better, so an improvement in the planning would be helpful.

Do you have any advice for potential customers?

Aubergine Solutions are a great company to work with and I'd be happy to recommend them to others. My advice to potential clients would be to make a detailed set of requirements (the more detailed the better) with clear milestones. Assume there will be technical challenges and issues along the way, so create the timeplan accordingly.

Please describe your company and your position there.

I am the Operations Manager at Coffective, a Certified B Corporation that supports state and local organizations in improving maternal and child health outcomes through increasing access to care, facilitating hospital quality improvement, and establishing consistent messaging.

For what projects/services did your company hire Aubergine Solutions ?

We'd gotten feedback our web app wasn't intuitive and noticed decreased usage. We also had new features we wanted to integrate. We hired Aubergine Solutions to enhance the UX/UI in order to improve user acquisition, onboarding, experience, and retention.

How did you select this vendor?

We posted the project on Upwork and shortlisted 8 individual contractors and agencies. We chose Aubergine Solutions based on samples of past projects, communication during recruitment, and the clear process they outlined for the project.

Describe the project in detail and walk through the stages of the project.

We had video call discovery sessions with the UX/UI designers and different members of our internal team to learn more about the company and its goals, our current web app and it's challenges, and our needs for an updated web app design. Aubergine conducted video call user interview sessions to get a deeper understanding of the issues they faced in using the web app and needs for improvement.

Initial mock-ups and workflows were created in Figma, and we went through rounds of feedback and iterations through email and video calls. Prototypes were created, and Aubergine conducted screensharing user feedback sessions to gather insight on the new designs. Our team supported in conducting additional user feedback sessions as well. Further internal feedback was provided through Figma comments, and designs finalized.

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

My team worked with a UX/UI designer primarily, with early support from a senior UX/UI designer / project manager. In the recruitment process and periodically throughout the project, we also interfaced with the co-founder / lead UX designer.

Can you share any outcomes from the project that demonstrate progress or success?

Our internal team is very happy with the designs that were created. Initial feedback from user feedback sessions was also positive, with many sharing that the designs and streamlined workflows would make them want to use the web app more. We are eager to begin development and get further user feedback.

How effective was the workflow between your team and theirs?

The project manager and primary UX/UI designer were easy to communicate with and very responsive. We had periodic video calls with email communication between. Weekly updates were sent about the previous week's progress and the upcoming tasks for the following week. During the later design phases, most communication was through Figma.

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

Overall quality of the new designs is great. We really appreciated the UX/UI designer's insights for improvements and consistencies. We felt she really took the time to understand our product and goals to make informed suggestions. She was able to aggregate differing feedback from the internal team, as well as push back when some of the ideas didn't make sense. The whole Aubergine team we interacted with is very professional, diligent, and a pleasure to work with.

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

Aubergine was very flexible in accommodating additional discovery, user interviews, and user feedback sessions at our request. This did delay the timeline from our end. Aubergine continued to advocate for getting back on track. Looking back, it may have been helpful to communicate sooner the critical timeline tipping point so that we had a bit more breathing room and time in the more important design finalization stage.

Please describe your company and your position there.

I'm the CPO of a Germany based Startup serving the whole nation with waste management services enabled by our digital platform.

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

After starting our business with an MVP we hired Aubergine to build that into a fully-fledged custom solution that would enable us to scale from just a few cities to the whole nation while serving our customers better. We needed intuitive, reliable software quickly to ensure that our internal teams would be able to handle a much higher load, while reducing error proneness of every step of the way.

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

We found Aubergine through a referral and considered them with several other parties. We ultimately went with Aubergine as they considered our needs, were proficient in our tech stack, demonstrated flexibility and offered both development and UX insights to us already in the initial code & UX review prior to kick-off of the project.

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

Aubergine provides a team of full-stack developers that work in 2-week scrum sprints along with our internal product managers on our customer-facing shop, our internal order management tools as well as all DevOps related topics. Relevant technologies and platforms include Python, Django, Angular, PostgreSQL, AWS, GCP, GitLab CI, Docker...

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

We worked with 2-4 full time full stack devs of varying seniority. Other resources such as QA engineers or Scrum Masters would come and go depending on the project's current needs.

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

Aubergine's team's attention to detail and willingness to go the extra mile have impressed us again and again, fulfilling the requirement to create valuable, usable, feasible and viable software. We've been working with Aubergine for 3 years now and intend to continue.

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

Project Management was mainly done by us in-house so it was great to see how well Aubergine adapted to our processes to enable efficient communication that mainly went through the channels JIRA, GitHub, Google Meet and Slack.

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

We have direct access to the whole team, which makes it easier to communicate our ideas. Things can be lost in translation if you're only talking to a project manager.

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

In hindsight, in several areas the dial between Documentation vs. Development Speed vs Code Quality could have been turned a little differently. But we were always happy with the reasoning behind decisions at the time they were made so can't blame anyone for that.

Introduce your business and what you do there.

I’m the co-founder and CTO of Quesmed, a company that focuses on medical school education. Our goal is to make preparing to become a doctor much easier and less monotonous. 

What challenge were you trying to address with Aubergine Solutions?

We needed help in designing our product. 

What was the scope of their involvement?

Aubergine Solutions has designed pretty much every aspect of our product so far. We’ve used their work as a base point whenever we internally work on designs. 

Notably, they redesigned our website during the start of our partnership. We’re currently working on an educational video. They use Figma to create their UI/UX designs. 

What is the team composition?

We’re working with four people, with two points of contact.

How did you come to work with Aubergine Solutions?

A colleague referred them. 

How much have you invested with them?

We’ve spent around £20,000 (approximately $27,000 USD).

What is the status of this engagement?

We’ve started working together in November 2020, and it’s ongoing. 

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

Aubergine Solutions has successfully redesigned our website. Their work has helped increase our sales by 550%. I’m completely satisfied with their work — they’ve exceeded my expectations. 

Their design team has been excellent, and they’ve stuck with us throughout the partnership. As a result, they’ve been really helpful since they already know our product and preferences very well. They can tell what we and our users like, so we’ve been able to work efficiently. 

How did Aubergine Solutions perform from a project management standpoint?

Aubergine Solutions is excellent at project management. They ensure our visions are met, deadlines are followed, and our teams are in sync. We communicate through emails and weekly meetings through Google Meet. 

What did you find most impressive about them?

Aubergine Solutions’ understanding of our vision is impressive. Initially, we’ve been skeptical by the amount of time they’ve spent studying our product. However, in the long run, that has been beneficial for us. They know our products and needs, and there have been a few back and forths between our teams — we’re thrilled with their work.

Are there any areas they could improve?

I can’t think of anything. 

Do you have any advice for potential customers?

Aubergine Solutions is very good at figuring out what you need and want. If you don’t have anything to show at the start of the project, provide them with a brief slide of your competitors. Pick the features you like, and they’ll be able to deliver based on that.