CSHARK

BACKGROUND

Introduce your business and what you do there.

I’m a co-founder and the CTO of Meta Bytes, a Swedish tech company. We become companies’ strategic partner for planning, development, and delivery. 

We’ve been around for about four-and-a-half years. We have many international clients, and we’re getting more traction in Sweden with smaller production companies. 

OPPORTUNITY / CHALLENGE

What challenge were you trying to address with CSHARK?

We’ve been using them to augment our development and architecture teams. In some cases, we’ve had to scale our team significantly and on short notice, so it was more convenient to partner with CSHARK and find the needed resources in a quick manner.

SOLUTION

What was the scope of their involvement?

My company and our clients act as the product owners, and we work in an agile sprint-based manner with CSHARK’s development team.

We develop a lot of cloud-based microservices, so aside from the tech stack itself, there’s a lot of architecture work involved. Most microservices are on AWS, but it depends on the client’s needs. We develop various solutions in Golang, including relational and document databases.

We do CI/CD/CD (continuous integration, continuous delivery, and continuous deployment) work in a DevOps fashion. We give the developers as much access as they need to deliver on the stories they’re working on. We use various technologies related to the DevOps lifecycle.

What is the team composition?

We have different account managers from CSHARK who help us find the correct resources. They’re brilliant at finding the right teammates for what we need, both in terms of tech stack and experience, but also in terms of fitting in with our team.

We work with their account managers to nail out the requirements for the team member we need, and they go do their thing. They’re usually quick in coming back with relevant candidates. We then have a short interview and onboard the new person.

How did you come to work with CSHARK?

We Googled around and found them. CSHARK had a very professional website. We sent them an email and had a call after that. We realized that they were very professional, so we onboarded a developer from them.

How much have you invested with them?

The total cost so far is in the region of $500,000.

What is the status of this engagement?

We started working with CSHARK in October 2019, and it’s ongoing.

RESULTS & FEEDBACK

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

We’ve worked and are working with other partners, and CSHARK has been one of our most positive experiences. They’re very good at coming up with relevant people with the correct skills. Working with CSHARK has allowed us to scale up and deliver quicker in response to client demand.

All of our teammates are very pleased with working with CSHARK. They’re very professional and skilled. They offer a good mix of competency and professionalism with regard to how they deliver. They also balance doing everything in a gold-standard way and actually delivering. Many developers and architects can become set on doing things perfectly, but that’s not applicable in all scenarios. There has to be a middle ground in how we deliver while still delivering quality, and we’ve seen that with CSHARK.

How did CSHARK perform from a project management standpoint?

They’re very good with project management. Their developers manage expectations very well. The resources we have are very experienced. They come up with timelines and stick to them. Depending on the requirements, it can be hard to come up with timelines, but we’ve had a very good experience with this overall.

What did you find most impressive about them?

The quality of the team members is very high, and they find them in a rapid manner. CSHARK has found 3–5 very relevant candidates within just a couple of weeks. They’re usually very experienced and have worked on similar projects, so onboarding them is much easier than in other scenarios.

Are there any areas they could improve?

I haven’t found anything negative that I’d like them to be better at. CSHARK has become better-prepared to meet our demands. The challenge is that they have to bring in people who are ready to work with us. This didn’t need much improvement before, and it’s nice to see that they’re improving in all of the areas we’re giving them feedback in.

Do you have any advice for future clients of theirs?

Having clear requirements can speed up the process. One of the errors I initially made was asking CSHARK if they had available resources, without providing specifics on the project and how long it would be. Had I better specified, I think the process would’ve been quicker. This goes for all projects.