Crema

Please describe your company and your position there.

I lead the digital products and services team for one of the top tax companies in the United States.

For what projects/services did your company hire Crema?

We hired crema at the beginning of the year to help us visualize concept and prototype the next iteration of our tax prep experience. Their work spread across mobile and.com designs.

What were your goals for this project?

Our goals for this project were to create a tax experience that was unlike any other, faster, more intuitive, and more personalized. We used the prototype to showcase the concept internally and get feedback externally.

How did you select this vendor?

We evaluated two primary vendors. one located in Kansas City, which ended up being Crema, and the other which is housed between Portland and Brooklyn. We made our decision based on the way we wanted to engage with the contractors and the pricing for the effort.

Describe the project in detail.

The project for which we hired crema is a flow through a tax prep journey that a returning client would go through when coming back their second year with us. The experience considers simple tax return scenarios and increases their speed to complete by four times.

The experience is more intuitive than what we currently have, leverages our new design system and helped to push that further forward, and considers differences between the mobile and web experience.

What was the team composition?

We had two designers dedicated to the effort and a project manager/product manager that helped with strategic direction and keeping things on track. The team spent part of their time embedded with our team in our offices so that we can work closely together. I truly believe that this helped us with our alignment and speed of execution.

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

The project was certainly a success from my perspective. we had requested that the team create an experience that was faster By two times. When they were done it was faster by four times. And the reviews that we got from internal and external users were certainly delightful. though we are early in the project, this certainly helped us to sharpen our focus of what could be.

How effective was the workflow between your team and theirs?

One of the best parts about this project was how well our teams work together. our lead product manager, lead designer, and the team at crema acted efficiently as one unit.

Because they were partly co-located and spoke together often, there wasn't a sense of us versus them. It was like we were truly one team. And the crema designers and strategists were so kind, thoughtful, and open to feedback that it was just delightful to work with them.

What did you find most impressive about this company?

I love the creativity of this firm. And it's not just design creativity. I see the way that they solve problems for their clients and how they view problem-solving and tackling challenges as just part of their DNA.

They're an incredibly curious and creative company. I love the product management staff that they have and would love to work with them more in the future. I follow their LinkedIn page and I'm always delighted to see the new projects that they post.

Are there any areas for improvement?

I'll start by saying that this comment is not unique to crema. I feel this way about most agencies that I have worked with over the last 5 years.

Having been at DirecTV from 2009 to 2015 and working with some of the most talented designers including motion graphic designers that I've ever experienced, I often feel that agency work is not as flashy as I'd like it to be. that would be the only thing that I would call out if something I'd like to see more of.

Introduce your business and what you do there.

I’m an account manager of an insurance brokerage consulting company. We consult our clients about the benefits we offer their employees. I have a book of business that I service to our clients, but I’m also in a project role where I work with our operations team.

What challenge were you trying to address with Crema?

We have designers who use Adobe InDesign to create client presentations or communications for our client’s employees. Our team has a very difficult working relationship with them because we’re creating thousands of standard and bespoke documents. Everyone is recreating the wheel over and over again, so it’s wasting time and creating an inconsistent work product.

What was the scope of their involvement?

Crema built a custom presentation template solution from scratch. The tool can covert CXML to InDesign files. Their team built a frontend for users to go through and choose a base template to then customize with their own data. This allows the user to go back in and rerun the presentation all on their own, without having to engage our design team. This ends up being a manual process because if they’re engaging the design team, they’re waiting between 24–48 hours to get revisions back.

There are two parts to the solution. The first side is a template creator tool that allows our admin to go in and create the best work product templates. These templates are pretty inclusive of most things that’d go into presentations but also contains different templates clients may need.

Once a template is created, it flows into the document builder side. Here, an end-user can select what side of the business they’re on and what type of documents they’d like to prepare. Then, they choose a base template. At this point, they can go through and upload Excel or PDF files to upload their data.

Once the data is pulled in, it runs through and the user can download their final document as a PDF created in InDesign. The download comes with all the style and branding details that’s consistent with our company’s style.

What is the team composition?

I’ve worked with a handful of people from their team including a QA person, two developers, a strategist, a designer, and a project manager who’s my main point of contact.

How did you come to work with Crema?

Our head of operations found them, and I got pulled in to lead the project. They had been in touch with Crema over the years. The Crema team had a good reputation for custom software development. There was a budding relationship for a while, and we didn’t know exactly how we could engage them. Everything lined up for this project.

How much have you invested with them?

We’ve invested between $250,000–$500,000.

What is the status of this engagement?

The project started in August 2019, and our engagement is ongoing. The MVP was completed by late November 2019. We had an engagement that ended in May 2020, and we’re now in a nine-week extension period.

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

The deliverables were amazing. It’s a little difficult to quantify the impact because essentially, we sat in a room all together, brainstormed ideas, made a bunch of post-it notes, and then Crema turned our ideas into a reality. It was a team effort, but they certainly did the creation part.

We have some beta testers for the solution, but we’re still cleaning up some things. Overall, the tool is amazing, and I’m very happy with it. Going forward, we’re going to make it more intuitive and reasonable for real business and that’s where the real test is going to come in. There have been demos, samples, and tests but no real business testing yet.

How did Crema perform from a project management standpoint?

Their team has done an excellent job with communication and in teaching me through this learning curve. We use Slack for correspondence and Trello for some bug reporting. Slack has been fantastic. I’m really happy with our use of it and don’t know how we could’ve done the project without it.

I appreciate the Crema team for pushing us into Slack because it’s helped incredibly to alleviate some burden on the communication side as well as just made the experience more efficient in general.

What did you find most impressive about them?

Strong, open communication, creativity, and genuineness are their most impressive traits. The Crema team is full of real people trying to get real stuff done. They’re sincere, and I’m very impressed with the individuals and overall company.

Are there any areas they could improve?

No, I can’t think of anything. Any pain points we’ve had have been due to the nature of the project and creating a product in general. If there was anything that needed improvement, we talked about it, resolved it, and moved on.

Introduce your business and what you do there.

 I run product and technology at a large consulting company that serves clients on a large variety of management topics.

What challenge were you trying to address with Crema?

We frequently need to build assets that help clients solve different challenges that they're facing.

What was the scope of their involvement?

They help create our applications, with a Ruby backend and React frontend. These are mostly related to organizational design, talent, and other things of that nature. Crema helps build applications, and they've been a partner of ours for two and a half years, helping us in building different apps.

What is the team composition?

We work with 10-12 people from their team. Each team has three developers, a designer, a product manager, and a QA specialist. I also have one point of contact that manages the entire project.

How did you come to work with Crema?

After seeing the prohibitive prices in larger cities, we decided to move our search to smaller cities with larger populations, which led us to Kansas City and Crema. They came highly recommended so we tried them out for a small project. We really liked the results and ended up moving a lot of our development projects to them afterward.

What is the status of this engagement?

We began working together in November 2017, and our engagement is ongoing.

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

We recently let go of a vendor because of the stark contrast in how they are versus how Crema is, in terms of collaboration. They have unique flexibility with how they do work; a lot of companies that we've worked with have very strict, regimented process of managing the development cycle, and sometimes we need to work more flexibly than that.

How did Crema perform from a project management standpoint?

They run everything that's required and are very transparent, while also being able to handle 90% of the issues that come up. Things only get elevated to me or my team when there's a real issue to address; they're great about addressing the vast majority of things that come up, like timeline shifts. They've learned our domain enough that if something ends up being complicated or taking longer than anticipated, they're good at recommending solutions. They can usually do that independently, without having to have too much back and forth with us, which we find a lot of value in. We need to be able to respond to some client needs that are more immediate. They're really adaptive and responsive to what's needed.

We use Jira, Slack, and regular meetings to keep in contact. They really work as an extension of our team. We do in-person meetings once a quarter that's having them come out to where the majority of us are in LA.

What did you find most impressive about them?

They're exceptionally trustworthy. There's an ample amount of transparency and we have a lot of trust between our teams, which lets me know they're always going to do the right thing. There's never any feeling like you don't have the information, and there's never a “negotiating with the vendor” type of dynamic. It's what we most appreciate since I don't have to worry about if they're doing the right thing.

Are there any areas they could improve?

I would love for them to get bigger.

Do you have any advice for potential customers?

My advice is to invest in a personal relationship. The more information you can give them about the problems you're trying to solve, the better they will be able to be at anticipating your needs. We give them access to our problem, which is why we work so well together. Establishing that relationship from the beginning is so critical.

Introduce your business and what you do there.

I’m the CTO and founder of an on-demand marketplace application that matches workers with companies that need them. This can be for as short as a 4-hour bartending gig on a Friday or as long as a 4-month warehouse or HR professional gig. We’re like Uber but for other types of jobs. A company posts the job, our algorithm matches the appropriate user, and that user gets a push notification on their phone. When they hit “Accept,” they get that job—no interview needed.

What challenge were you trying to address with Crema?

We were an idea-stage company. Our original interaction with Crema was to work on product definition for our MVP [minimum viable product]. That relationship subsequently transitioned into evaluating different ways of building that app, including either building a full team internally or hiring a different kind of technology company. We ultimately ended up hiring Crema to do the product build as well for our MVP. We built our relationship with them to the point where we both took a significant amount of ownership in the product. 

What was the scope of their involvement?

We did something with them called an ideation session. The goal was to get, from my perspective, additional engineers to estimate how difficult the product would be to build, figure out what type of product we should build, scale it back a bit, and get an external set of eyes on the features to figure out what our core MVP could be. Subsequently, post go-live, we transitioned quickly from that market-ready team to re-subsidizing our labor internally with employees that used to be handled by Crema. We went from them being our whole product team down to just having some resources for a couple days a week. There are very few full-time resources on the project now. They helped me with everything from new hires to transitioning the knowledge base from them to my new internal employees.

There was a UX designer, a product strategist, a project manager, an iOS developer, an Android developer, a web developer, and a backend Ruby on Rails developer. At some point, we had an extra frontend React web developer and an extra backend Ruby developer. Our core team was a person per discipline—Ruby, React, iOS, and Android. We subsequently decided to rebuild our mobile platform on React Native, so we just have a React Native resource now building on Android and iOS.

How did you come to work with Crema?

I had a friend that sold a company to Facebook, and he’s now at Airbnb. He’s smarter than me, so I reached out to him asking which outsourced companies he’d recommend. He mentioned two firms—a Midwest company and Crema. I’m pretty upfront and like working with people who are humble. We chose Crema over rebuilding the product alone or outsourcing it to a different company because they were an established team that would allow me to get the product to market as quickly as possible, which was our main goal.

How much have you invested with Crema?

We’ve worked with them quite closely to establish a structure that works for both of us. I can provide their card rate, but I am uncomfortable disclosing our relationship with them.

What is the status of this engagement?

We started working with them in November of 2015. The first product launched in July of 2016. 

Could you share any evidence that would demonstrate the productivity, quality of work, or the impact of the engagement?

The product has never been rejected from the App Store on any submissions. That first time you submit a product, it can be scary. There are these horror stories of companies having products stuck in limbo. It’s amazing that we always ship a product every 2 weeks. They’re very good at allowing me to iterate fast.

From my perspective, the most beneficial thing for me, as the co-founder of the company, is that I rarely get to spend enough time on the product as I’d like to since I have to go fundraising for a week or work on a new partnership. Before, I had internal hires that could replace me during those early months where you can be pulled in many different directions. I knew that I could go away for a week and that the product would continue humming along and they’d execute what I wanted. In the event that my absence would have made a material difference for the product, they would find a way to get in touch with me and make sure that the right thing was delivered.

Crema is great at pushing me to do the right thing for my company as opposed to the right thing for them. That React example showcases this: they originally had 2 resources on the project to build 2 different apps that did the same thing. Because they’re such a small agency, when React Native came out and started to gain traction, they were able to champion that the firm should use it, get approval from the owners of the company that it’s now framework-based supported, and then pitch a project to me that allowed me to reduce my monthly spend and ship a product that can be built faster.

They’re uniquely small enough that if they see something beneficial pop-up, they’ll recommend it, as long as it’s right for me and regardless of their long-term billable hours. In a startup, cash is king.

It’s a trust thing. Working with contractors can be stressful, especially some of my other products. When I make a requirements document, it’s literally built exactly how I write it. Crema, however, does a pretty good job of knowing when I’ve mistyped a requirement, knowing when to push back, and knowing when to ask me a question to make sure that what they’re building reflects what I want.

How did Crema perform from a project management standpoint?

There’s a specific resource on my team who’s our project manager, and he’s incredible. I wish I could poach him, but it’s quite clear that I can’t.

They hit every deadline. We’re Agile, so there aren’t hard builds that we’re trying to release. I know when people are going to deliver during a week, and I’m made aware during every sprint if we’re going to hit it. If they’re under risk, I’ll get a yellow light. I always know what’s going to be shipped. If for any reason the product that’s about to be shipped isn’t exactly what I think it is, they’ll let me know up front and give a solid reason why (usually because I added scope).

What did you find most impressive about Crema?

They have a strong product team, as opposed to just developers. Often, a company is quite strong in development, branding, user flow, or UX, but they’ve been a delightful mix of all that. It’s a product team for hire as opposed to a development team or UX team for hire. Having everyone who built the product, especially in those early days, are all around the table at the same time is significantly better than trying to piecemeal a team together between a branding firm and a development shop offshore. That’s been the main difference. I’ve never had a full product team for any product I’ve worked on before.

Are there any areas Crema could improve?

When I first started, Crema’s QA wasn’t as solid as I was used to. I actually gave them that area of improvement, and they hired a new resource. They listened to my feedback and improved.

The only thing that would be beneficial is spending more time on internal tools before a product goes live, but that would have pushed back my delay. They could emphasize internal tools for the company more, understanding that we’ll have users within our organization who should have tools before the product goes live.

I really don’t have anything negative to say or big areas of improvement for them. They send me forms every month to see if there was anything they could do better. They’ve fixed everything I pointed out. 

Introduce your business and what you do there.

I’m the CEO of HipHire. The best way to think about the company is as a Match.com for part-time blue- and white-collar jobs that tend to have high turnover in industries like restaurants, retail, and logistics. 

What challenge were you trying to address with Crema?

We wanted to find the right company that could interpret market research in order to focus and build the right product based on my 14 months of data. It wasn’t the traditional "I have a problem. I'm hoping you can help me solve this. Here's what I think the solution is." I had already derisked a lot of the typical things that a firm might be concerned about. 

What was the scope of their involvement?

Crema provided a frontend and a backend engineer, a product owner in charge of product design, and a project manager, so it was roughly five people over the course of this initial stage. In the early stages, the product architect helped deconstruct all of the research I had done and the validated concept I came up with and put together what we thought the initial solution would look like.

To them, the most important thing was less about the tech and more about ensuring that we're building the right minimal viable product (MVP) out of the gate that will solve the problem and allow me to get traction. It wasn’t something to put out there with missing things and traction issues. They were really focused on making sure that I had a viable product that could start functioning from day one. It didn't have all the bells and whistles, and we didn't need all that; it just needed to be the MVP, and that was important.

What they built originally for me was a web platform. It was mobile-responsive because I have a marketplace business with a side for businesses and another for job seekers, so it needed to respond to the technology that both of those types of groups tend to leverage when looking for part-time jobs. The technology was important because I wanted to make sure that we were leveraging not the latest and greatest but were using a core technology that we're going to be sitting on for the next five or six years, and that was their skill set and strength. It wasn't leading-edge, where 1% of developers were using the platform, nor was it an older technology that's been around for a while. I know it was built in JavaScript, Heroku, and a couple of other technologies.

The solution was more about the vision and understanding user functionality. That's where I feel Crema is very strong. It's not just fixing the leaky pipe and then realizing there's another leak further down. They’re able to see the bigger picture and understand what you're trying to accomplish to make sure that it’s being incorporated into the design. That's also important because, as they see the bigger picture, they know how things are going to expand, change, and adjust, and we've accounted for that in the design. It's like we've looked at the five-year picture and shrunk it down to one year, but as you grow and build and add on, this is going to expand into that five-year vision. A lot of companies just fix for now. Then, as you push the rock down the road, you keep dealing with the problem.

How did you come to work with Crema?

For me, it's all about the people that I work with. I find the tech and design the easy part. I really focus on companies and people that I want to spend time with. Crema’s culture is something that's really important to me since my own background is naturally drawn to strong, culture-driven leaders and companies. That tells you a lot about a well-run, put-together organization versus just a team of people.

I had met the owners of Crema through various social and entrepreneurial events here in Kansas City, so we already knew each other. I had touched base with several other design firms, but I knew the reputation of and the quality of work produced by Crema. I always had intentions to work with those folks, and there was never a reason not to.

How much have you invested with Crema?

We did things on a fixed cost, and then our support contracts were annual fixed cost. I know for our support costs, Crema was initially designed to be the tech company until you were able to build up your own tech firm, and then they're able to hand you off things and you can take it from there. They limit their support, at least at that time, to a set amount of hours a month. If you want more than that, it's probably time for you to build your own team and start taking things over. We had a contract that was probably $2,000 a month that included 15 or 20 hours of support that we spread out over a year.

In terms of the bill, we just broke it down to one fee for the whole thing. 

What is the status of this engagement?

We signed the contract in December of 2014. There was about a four-month design process. We had to ramp up in January and then ramp down prior to launching. We pushed dates out, so they were done way before June of 2015. We deployed the web version in mid-June.

Could you share any evidence that would demonstrate the productivity, quality of work, or impact of the engagement?

The quality of the product is the most important thing, and we never had anything break on the website that kept people from doing stuff. All of the functionality was extremely well tested and deployed. We were never in bug-fix mode. We were always ahead doing feature enhancements and improvements as part of the support contract. In the support contract, for small features that were already there, we would make slight improvements based on analytics and user feedback. Then, we might build and budget in smaller projects when we realized a feature was missing, and Crema would work that into their Scrum process.

The biggest comment I always got from our customers is how well it worked. Look and feel was not as important as making sure that it was reliable, did what it was supposed to do, and people didn't just get hung up anywhere inside of it.

How did Crema perform from a project management standpoint?

That is one thing they are the best at. They assign you a project manager, and we would talk at least three times a week. I always knew what was coming up in the next sprint because we would always talk about in advance. They always hit all of their deadlines. They were completely open and transparent. I can't say enough good things about their project management. That is something that's so missed, and I think they're just hitting it perfectly and are only going to get better at it.

What did you find most impressive about Crema?

I haven't worked with a lot of other vendors. But, the difference that I see, which comes down to the technology design, is that people are only able to fix one problem. There was a recent issue that came up that I worked with another company for. They deployed a fix, but then it took me two days to deconstruct it and say, "Here's the bigger vision. This is really how it needs to work." This other group is made up of surgeons in terms of programming, but the vision process falls more on my shoulders.. In look and feel and other things, I think we've reached a little bit of parity in today's web and app development. The way Crema approaches design—thinking about the bigger picture, project management, and culture—is really where they have an advantage over companies looking past that.

Are there any areas Crema could improve?

That's a hard one. It may be their level of expertise. I was working with some of the newer employees, so take that for what it's worth. They were probably not as efficient, but they had other experts inside the company to fall back on. It's like you might have a new guy out of college working on your car, but he always had the 20-year mechanic to ask questions. None of that ever revealed itself in terms of design or deployment. That was taken into consideration on the bid estimate because it was giving an opportunity for newer folks to work on new technology.

I'm completely transparent. If I know there's a problem, I'm always happy to make other people aware of it. But, to be honest with you, it's hard to throw rocks at these guys.