Crafted

Please describe your company and your position there.

I am the CEO of a digital marketplace for sustainable commodities.

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

I needed help building our first real end to end software product from a seed concept. We would then replace Crafted with a full time internal team as time progressed.

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

I interviewed 6 outsourced Product Development firms from East Europe to Silicon Valley. I got an intro to Crafted from mutual friend.

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

Flesh out the product and technical scope from concept / pitch Build prototypes for testing Learn, iterate, build for Alpha and then Beta launch with paying customers

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

2 PMs (incl CEO, part time PM) 2 to 3 Engineers (Incl CTO) 2 Product Designers (1 part time)

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

They built a fully functional battle station that we launch publicly!

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

They are very inclusive and collaborative, using frameworks to stimulate discussion and ideation.

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

Adam and Ryan (CEO and CTO) are deeply experienced and were stable forces as we iterated and adjusted our approach.

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

I think the blended pricing model could use some tweaking as we wanted less junior time and more senior time. I also think that some of the design processes and thinking could have been more efficient and would have benefitted from more senior opinions and experience.

Introduce your business and what you do there.

I’m the SVP of product and design for an applicant tracking system.

What challenge were you trying to address with Crafted?

We needed someone to kickstart and consult us on our transformation and re-platforming project.

What was the scope of their involvement?

Crafted essentially helped us build and design a flexible configurable app. We identified areas of improvement through app research within our space to produce the best product in our industry.

We utilized React and Java on the front- and backend, and implemented Agile Scrum methodology. Apart from that, they taught us a lot about how we can streamline and add efficiencies to the development process.

What is the team composition?

We worked directly with Adam (Founder & CEO) and his team.

How did you come to work with Crafted?

They previously worked with our CEO’s last company, so we brought them in to see what they could give us from a value perspective.

What is the status of this engagement?

We worked together from July 2020–March 2021.

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

Upon our first release, we saw a 300% increase in applicant flow for some of our customers and we’re now processing about 12–15 million applications a year — which is a vast improvement compared to what we were garnering before this app.

Other than that, our call center call volume has tripled in customer concerns, specifically with applicants attempting to reset their passwords.

How did Crafted perform from a project management standpoint?

They performed excellently from a project management perspective — their product manager was very skilled and did a great job of ensuring that the project was consistently on track to completion.

We use JIRA and Confluence to manage the project and typically communicated through Zoom and Slack.

What did you find most impressive about them?

We’re impressed with their well-established process and they also worked well with our company’s infrastructure — they embedded themselves within the company to drive process improvement. 

Are there any areas they could improve?

Our partnership was a huge success so nothing comes to mind. I just wish we kept them around longer but unfortunately, it didn’t fit our budget.

Do you have any advice for potential customers?

I would advise you to be open to Crafted’s process and model. They have a lot of experience in developing balanced teams and the sooner you embrace that, the more streamlined the process will be.

Introduce your business and what you do there.

I am the CPO of a company that provides corporations and insurance carriers with software services and solutions for mobility risk management.

What challenge were you trying to address with Crafted?

We wanted two things out of the engagement: to extend our new product's functionality and sharpen product and engineering skills internally. 

We had just released a new product and needed Crafted to help build new features. We had also just hired new product managers, and I wanted Crafted to jumpstart our product development by introducing the concept of a balanced team that works on continuous integration and deployment. I needed them to accelerate our engineering and development skills and reinforce product development principles with some of my new hires.

What was the scope of their involvement?

We reached out to them and had an initial discussion surrounding what we were looking to accomplish from a technology and internal skills development standpoint. We already had a framework and infrastructure that they plugged into and built on top of. 

They primarily focused on expanding our application to allow customers to import and upload insurance loss data and integrate it into the app. They also built data reporting and visualizations alongside the system’s pre-existing data. They used tools such as React for UI, and Java for development, and deployed on top of a cloud boundary. 

As for skills development, Crafted started the project and ran a workstream with their balanced team for a while, and then we assigned some of our engineers to the project so they could learn and develop additional skills. Once we wrapped the engagement, our internal team took over from a maintenance standpoint.

The main project has wrapped, but we continue to engage their services for more minor things. 

What is the team composition?

We work with a balanced full stack team, including two developers, a product manager, and a UI/UX designer.

How did you come to work with Crafted?

They were a referral from mutual contacts who introduced us.

How much have you invested with them?

We have spent around $300,000–$500,000. 

What is the status of this engagement?

We started working together in September 2019, and the primary engagement wrapped in January 2020. Since then, we’ve interacted with them on smaller projects to glean their advice.

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

They are responsible for building something that has become the cornerstone of one of our enhanced product offerings. Their contributions have significantly impacted the growth of our upsell and cross-sell velocity in the product set. Their efforts have also been essential to a couple of our strategic accounts.

How did Crafted perform from a project management standpoint?

Their philosophy around project management very much aligns with ours. They have a highly iterative process that includes daily and weekly checkpoints, so there’s minimal opportunity for drift. 

We brought them on initially because we saw an opportunity for them to help us reinforce their lean principles within our organization. We did not follow the traditional project management trajectory with Gantt charts and project plans. Instead, we set goals and anti-goals early on, and we measured our attainment of those goals on a weekly basis. As a result, the scope was delivered on time and within the agreed-upon budget. 

What did you find most impressive about them?

I am most impressed with their approach. I appreciate that they don’t necessarily come in and generate consulting revenue through development for hire. What attracts us to Crafted is their strategy of embedding themselves in the teams within our organization. Due to their expertise in their field, they have the ability to implement the best practices they’ve cultivated over time, and that’s why I would consider using them again.

If I was looking to add 15 engineers to a project, I might not use Crafted to do so; but if I was looking to implement best practices, accelerate a project, or introduce new skills or tools to the team, they’re probably at the top of my list of vendors to call. 

I am more inclined to use Crafted for a project that I’m taking on from ground zero, that I want to accelerate and get some fresh thinking on instead of using them to add resources to a project that is already behind schedule. In my toolbox of vendors, that’s how I view them. We needed them from inception to delivery, so the engagement worked for us.

Are there any areas they could improve?

I am pretty thrilled with the engagement. The only thing I’d say is that they’re more comfortable taking a project from inception to delivery than coming into a project that is already underway. I’m not sure if that’s a fair criticism because I think that is the main focus of their business.