Echo

Please describe your company and your position there.

CTO of a company building various it products and solutions.

For what projects/services did your company hire Echo?

Staff augmentation with a highly skilled people.

What were your goals for this project?

From idea to shipping actual production-level product.

How did you select this vendor?

Inbound outreach, professional communication, couple of live meetings.

Describe the project in detail.

Guest WiFi marketing app. We help You to grow Your customer loyalty, gain insights and increase positive feedback. Make informed decisions with extensive data from every client visiting your venues. Insights that you can trust – helping your business to stay ahead of the competition.

What was the team composition?

The front-end, back-end and QA

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

Scalable, robust, easy to use high quality product we are able to sell.

How effective was the workflow between your team and theirs?

No issues at all.

What did you find most impressive about this company?

They were responsive, professional, and easy to work with. They were also flexible.

Are there any areas for improvement?

No issues.

Please describe your company and your position there.

We manufacture software for the Legal industry. Founded in 2001 with the head office in the US, and then increased count of office all over the World up to ~10. We have almost 400 employees. I'm the Team Lead of engineering team.

For what projects/services did your company hire Echo?

We hired Echo to help us with software development (important and huge changes to one of our main products), because of short time frames and lack of engineers.

What were your goals for this project?

The goals were: to solve technical debts and to re-write one of our main products which perform MS Office documents content comparison. Our product is based on Rich Text Format (RTF) and the goal was to replace it with DOCX (Office Open XML) format including application's core re-design and re-write.

How did you select this vendor?

Echo UA was one of the vendors that are present in Ukraine, they have Ukrainian/Russian speaking engineers, they are pretty famous in our region, and have a good service.

Describe the project and the services they provided in detail.

They provided us with the qualified developer who helped us with the project changes development. He quickly adopted to the Team (and Team to him) and helped with huge workload during project development.

What was the team composition?

The project team was about 25-27 engineers (6-7 QA Engineers, all other developers). Echo UA provided us with one developer.

Can you share any information that demonstrates the impact that this project has had on your business?

We still in process of development withthe project. And we expecting to increase the quality and speed of documents comparison after work is done, to continue to be the leader of software vendor on legal market and bring more and more clients.

How was project management arranged and how effective was it?

Project management was regular for our team. We communicated each day several times during daily stand-ups and engineering meetings to discuss all ongoing work. Communication was through the: Teams, Skype, JIRA, Stash.

What did you find most impressive about this company?

We were surprised and pretty satisfied with the level of communication, feedback sessions and the level of service. We had 2 more companies we used to bring more engineers to the project and they do not have such level of service as Echo UA has. So, next time if any one ask me whom to pick next time, I think the first thing in my mind will be Echo UA.

Are there any areas for improvement?

Nothing comes to my mind.

Introduce your business and what you do there.

I'm the founder of Travel Guide Platform, and we provide a digital guidebook for guests who are staying at vacation rentals.

What challenge were you trying to address with EchoUA?

We needed a full–time developer who didn’t have the price of a UK-based shop to support our mobile web app and build new features

What was the scope of their involvement?

They coordinated significantly with our current U.K. agency. Since our current agency understood the structure of our app, they served somewhat of a “mentor” role with Echo. In the end, Echo completely redesigned the app and added features using Python and Django

What is the team composition?

There are three people that we’ve worked with. Our everyday communication is with our account manager. We provide feedback on the developer and discuss our future goals. We have also occasionally interacted with our developer’s manager and a development specialist for advanced technical issues.

How did you come to work with EchoUA?

They were recommended to us by our U.K. agency when we wanted to find a less-expensive option offshore.

How much have you invested with them?

We pay them $2,800 a month.

What is the status of this engagement?

We began working with them November 2017 and the work is ongoing.

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

The biggest success is that we’ve achieved our main objective: having a full–time developer that understands and supports our product. We're able to communicate directly with someone dedicated to our product. We’re extremely happy with the output as are our users.

How did EchoUA perform from a project management standpoint?

We use Basecamp and Slack, so we're able to communicate instantly even with the slight time difference.

What did you find most impressive about them?

They are very personable, friendly, easy to work with, and have a 'small' approach—in a positive sense. The owner even came to London to meet with us. Nothing is promised, then not delivered; they're reliable.

Are there any areas they could improve?

No. They should keep doing what they're doing.

Introduce your business and what you do there.

I’m the head of IT at Platinum Group, which is an e-commerce ticketing company. Our customers are worldwide organizers of events like Formula One Circuits, and tennis tournaments. The technology we use is PHP7 with AngularJS for the frontend, and we are starting to introduce Symphony as our new framework.

What challenge were you trying to address with EchoUA?

We have an internal IT team. However, the team wasn’t growing fast enough to cover our business growth and we needed more IT members available quickly. We decided to use an agency for a faster way of recruiting people.

What was the scope of their involvement?

They recruited a team of people for us, and continue to host them. They work with our team on making our software better, which involves development, testing, and so on.

They work on multiple projects. One of those is our newest ticket shop, which is the most advanced we have. They also work with our DevOps team to help with short-term tickets.

What is the team dynamic?

Currently, we work with nine people. There is one team leader, two frontend developers, and the others are full stack developers. The team will continue to grow in the future because we have so many projects.

How did you come to work with EchoUA?

It was a long process. When we identified that we needed to go offshore for some of our development, we researched many different companies online. We knew we wanted to stay in Europe, and we had a list of 15 companies, most of them located in Eastern Europe.

There were three main criteria we used. Quality of the technology they cover was one. We knew we wanted PHP specialists and that was a key point that EchoUA put forward. The second was the price, and the third was communication. We had very good communication with EchoUA, and that helped them to secure the contract.

How much have you invested with them?

Our investment depends on the number of people we hire. On average, the monthly amount is between $10,000 - $15,000 USD.

What is the status of this engagement?

We started working with them in December 2016, and the relationship is ongoing.

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

It’s difficult to give an estimation of how much they impacted our business because they’re working on so many projects. However, they help our team to implement new technologies, and they change some of the technology that we have and improve features. We feel like they can give us a lot of advice.

How did EchoUA perform from a project management standpoint?

We manage the projects from our offices, though the roadmap is shared by different teams. We have a project leader here who coordinates with EchoUA’s team leader. We give them the project they’re working on, and then their team leader manages the backlog among the people in the team.

It took us a while to hire that team leader because we needed this person to be fluent in English so that we can speak with them. If you have a very good developer that doesn’t speak very good English, it doesn’t really matter; we can work around that. But the team leader needs to be able to speak English.

What did you find most impressive about them?

One of their strengths is the way they adapt to their clients, and are very eager to listen to the customer. For example, they learned quickly what type of person we wanted to hire. They got involved in the hiring process, but we kept the lead. They also have the ability to find the right people for their own team.

Are there any areas they could improve?

EchoUA is very good technically, and the team is highly qualified. I can’t think of anything major to improve, but we continuously want more staff more quickly.

The main issue is that they don’t share an office with us. The distance makes it more difficult to train the team on the functional elements.

This review was updated on May 4th, 2018 by the client. New content is below.

Has the scope of their involvement expanded in any way? Have they taken on new projects or helped out in any different way in the past year?

Our engagement has grown since then. They’ve expanded the team we work with significantly. We now have 17 people assigned to us from EchoUA, including two team leaders, 14 developers, and one QA resource. They comprise two teams who coordinate and focus on different types of projects.

Do they work directly with your in-house team and coordinate with those developers?

Yes, they do. We're putting together a new organization at the moment. Having grown substantially, we can now assign internal team leaders and senior developers to collaborate with each of EchoUA's teams. These members of our staff provide all the necessary information.

Do you mind choosing one project that they've worked on you worked on for you and highlighting which technologies they were using? What are the forms and functionalities you're asking them to build out?

One example is our e-commerce shop where event organizer can sell tickets. It allows people to select specific seats they want. EchoUA manages many of our projects like this one. The developers use angular.js as the main programming language. Backend technology they produce is coded with PHP 7.

Is it integrated with a payment system or any databases?

Our central database is MySQL. We use this system for all our ticket sales platforms, which features an integrated Ingenico payment system. This particular solution was built specifically for the United Arab Emirates market.

What is the current status of the engagement? You began in December 2016 and it's ongoing, correct? Have there been any breaks in between, or has it been a continuous relationship?

There have been no breaks so far. We actually renewed their contract in December and intend to scale up our partnership. They've currently in the process of recruiting new resources to work with us. By late summer 2018, we'll hopefully have a third team working for us from EchoUA.

I also want to update the project size if that's necessary. Do you know approximately how much money you've invested with them so far since 2016?

When our team was closer to nine people, we paid between $10,000–$15,000 per month. Naturally, the monthly fee has increased since we're now working with many more people. The last two invoices were around $40,000 each. Assuming we maintain a team of 17 people, we'll spend between $480,000–$540,000 this year.

In terms of feedback, are there any new results you can share? Do you have evidence or metrics or just general success stories that would demonstrate the impact that they've had on your company?

EchoUA’s latest key success story was implementing a Symfony framework on our back-office solution. As the basis for the new version of our software, this was quite an important and heavy-duty project. Their specialized expertise using this technology provided the critical first step for our code. All the developers, including our internal ones, will work off this base for the next iteration of our product.

Overall, are your developers happy working with the EchoUA team members? Is there good communication between the two groups?

Our team is happy to work with the new additions from EchoUA. Communication is challenging because working in different countries makes it harder to share information. This includes non-technical context details. Sometimes, this distance can cause miscommunications or oversights.

Cultural differences can also make it harder for them to understand our user base. Our users sometimes need to discuss a topic with EchoUA. Their entire team might not be familiar with our business yet. To their credit, they've gotten much better after just one year. Senior staff members are currently training the more recent hires.

Do you still have a coordinator on your team that helps with project management?

Yes, but we're going to change that soon. One coordinator isn't enough for a 17-person team. We're implementing paired teams, rather than just a single team leader. This management style is much easier. The team leaders on both sides easily stay in touch and manage the backlog and organization.

What do you find most impressive or noteworthy about them that might distinguish EchoUA from other partners you've used in the past?

Their technical expertise sets them apart. They're very advanced in terms of working with new technologies, Especially the web environment. Consistently keeping track of all our new projects and emerging technology is one of their most important skills.

Do you have any suggestions about things that they can do to improve or even grow going forward?

They should encourage their whole staff to be bilingual. English proficiency would be useful when speaking with clients’ users. I know they're working on that goal and have been holding classes for their team. They should also probably find a way to secure new hires, rather than keeping all the same co-workers. This should be a shared responsibility with their clients.

Do you have any tips or advice that you would give to any future potential clients of theirs about how to get the most out of a good working relationship with them?

Encourage them to come work in your offices at least once in a while. It makes a difference. We had their most senior teammates spend one week in our offices. It was really useful to be able to share a lot of information with them that they could relay back to the whole company. This is also a great way to secure EchoUA’s stability.

Introduce your business and what you do there.

I’m a digital marketing manager with a tech start-up based in New York City. We help companies to integrate business apps in one platform and create awesome dashboards without coding. We empower end users. 

What challenge were you trying to address with Echo UA?

Our big problem was that we didn’t have a web developer for our public-facing marketing website, our main digital asset that introduced our product and the company. Thus, we wanted to make it modern and professional.

What was the scope of their involvement?

Our old website looked really bad and it had so many bugs in it. I hired a web designer and a developer from Echo UA, and they rebuilt our website. The designer prototyped the wireframes and mockups of how the website would look, what the user experience and user flow would be. After that, once the mockups and structure were approved, we passed it to the web developer and he built it. We kept the old site, but we rebuilt a completely new one. It’s a drastic improvement because the old site looked like an amateur built it at home. The new site is fast and modern.

How did you come to work with Echo UA?

I looked at different vendors, but we didn’t issue a call for proposals. We chose Echo UA because of the quality of their references. We decided to move forward and see how the first few months went, and then we signed a yearlong contract. We started the project in October of 2016.

How much have you invested with Echo UA?

I can’t disclose the exact amount, but up until now we’ve invested between $10,000-$50,000.

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

The best metric of success is traffic. When we launched the new website, we cut our advertising budget significantly but our traffic didn’t drop as much as we cut our budget, if that makes sense. We attribute that to the success of the website.

How did Echo UA perform from a project management standpoint?

Echo UA was responsive and accommodating, and they found the right people for this particular project. They were very responsive in trying to work with us. For instance, with time zones they’re six or seven hours ahead of us, and they were great about staying late at the office so we could have a significant overlap in our workdays to work through any problems that arose.

What did you find most impressive about Echo UA?

They had really great customer service. They’re willing to accommodate the client. Since the website launched, we’ve asked them to continue working with us on our internal team.

Are there any areas Echo UA could improve?

Their designer and developer can handle English over email and things like that, but they don’t speak English well. If their staff could speak English better, that would be a great improvement for the company overall. There is a project manager who is good with English, but it would be good to be able to work with the designer and developer directly.

Introduce your business and what you do there.

I’m the head of software development at Powwownow, a conference calling service provider.

What challenge were you trying to address with EchoUA?

We have an in-house development team here, but in order to get through some of the concurrent projects that we manage at any given time, we look to have flexible resourcing options. We wanted a relationship with an organization that could provide us with developers for short- to medium-term projects

What was the scope of their involvement?

EchoUA worked with us on two significant projects, both in developing Python applications. The first project monitors our customers’ interactions with our service and then aggregates that data and feeds it to a third party system that we use to send our relevant emails. On that project, we brought on EchoUA developers midway through the project. The second major project they’ve helped with is a billing service. When our customers use our service to make conference calls, we use this software to assign the cost of the call in real time. In both cases, EchoUA developers worked alongside our in-house development team. On the second project, because they’ve been involved with it from the beginning, they’re in the position of making architectural decisions as well. We’re also about to embark on a new relationship with them where they will provide us with PHP developers on a short- to mid-term contract basis to get us through a specific project pipeline.

How did you come to work with EchoUA?

I did some research to find potential suitable organizations. It was as simple as getting in touch with a number of organizations, and the one that seemed most suited to the work that we were doing and our requirements was Echo.

How much have you invested with EchoUA?

Our investment may average between $3,000-$5,000 per month.

What is the status of this engagement?

We started off by getting one person involved for a trial period, and then as that trial progressed, our needs increased so we increased the work that we were doing with Echo as we went along. That was towards the end of 2016, possibly the end of the third quarter of last year, and our engagement continues. We expect to continue working with EchoUA for the foreseeable future.

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

Because we have this pipeline of concurrent projects, there would have been projects that we simply wouldn’t have been able to get delivered on time had it not been for working with EchoUA. That’s the best way to quantify the effectiveness of our relationship with them: the projects that we otherwise wouldn’t have been able to deliver or that would have taken us longer to deliver. With EchoUA on board, we’ve been able to manage all those concurrent projects.

How did EchoUA perform from a project management standpoint?

We use JIRA as our project management software, as well as Skype and our own conferencing software for daily communications. EchoUA has gone to great lengths to ensure that requirements are properly understood. They even took the step of allocating a project manager for our projects; they came to us and said they thought things would run smoother if we took that step. So now our tech lead will meet multiple times per week with the EchoUA project manager over a video conference and discuss the progress of various tasks and their requirements. That worked out very nicely for us because there can be a language barrier with the developers. But that’s completely overcome by having a project manager. There are times when we would need to be explaining the same information to multiple people, but instead, we can explain things to the project manager, who can then pass on that information as required.

What did you find most impressive about EchoUA?

The thing that really stands out is how much effort they continue to put in to ensure that our relationship and the work that we do runs as smoothly as possible. Other organizations that we’ve worked with have simply delivered on our requirements, but EchoUA is constantly striving to improve and ensuring that things are working as effectively as possible.

Are there any areas EchoUA could improve?

I suppose there have been one or two things, but that’s true of any new relationship. But those areas for improvement are addressed very quickly. I genuinely feel like I have the full support of the organization. When I have raised something as an issue, they’ve been very quick to respond. They’ve said, “Yes, we’ve been concerned about that too and we wanted to talk to you,” or “Yes, it’s an issue. How about we change things and do this instead?” One of those things was the language barrier that we faced early on, but before it even became a problem, they were on it. That’s when the allocated the project manager to us. That’s what I mean when I say they excelled at making the relationship work.

Please describe your company and your position there.

We are small custom software/IT consulting company. I am a director there

For what projects/services did your company hire Echo?

It was a project for medical studies management software for research group within university. They were managing everything via paper questionnaires and manual input into excel files which grew more and more problematic for them.

What were your goals for this project?

Goal was to produce software with heavy emphasis on user friendliness (end users are not really power-users when it comes to computers) to ease data gathering and study management.

How did you select this vendor?

After research online, they were one of few companies that we found. Echo was chosen because they have been the best conversationists

Describe the project and the services they provided in detail.

Since we were main delivery party for this project Echo supplied us one full time frontend developer.

What was the team composition?

On Echo's side we had only single frontend developer. On our side we had UX designer/analyst, backend developer and "product owner" like person that was in close contact with university

Can you share any information that demonstrates the impact that this project has had on your business?

Since we are in business of delivering software it didn't have any significant impact. Project is still ongoing, but frontend part is done.

How was project management arranged and how effective was it?

Unfortunately entire's project management was too chaotic - customer was indecisive and requesting pivoting changes quite a bit. On Echo's side on the other hand I have nothing to complain given these circumstances.

What did you find most impressive about this company?

Compared to their competitors we spoke to they seemed to be the most professional and mature ones. Looking back at the project, their professionalism and maturity were fully confirmed.

Are there any areas for improvement?

I think both we and Echo could have used more regular communication.

Please describe your company and your position there.

Kunai offers consulting services to Financial Services companies. We help them automate their back office and elevate their customer experience with our advisory and program delivery services.

For what projects/services did your company hire Echo?

We had several innovative projects with large Financial Services clients who needed full stack, backend, and frontend engineers.

What were your goals for this project?

There were several goals across the various projects. Each hire was able to help us reach our goals.

How did you select this vendor?

Echo was referred to me by my Supervisor.

Describe the project and the services they provided in detail.

There were many financial services projects such as building dashboards, payments features, etc.

What was the team composition?

Teams consisted of PMs, business development, designers, and engineers.

Can you share any information that demonstrates the impact that this project has had on your business?

Echo helped us successfully staff various projects and we have a list of contractors we would use again from Echo.

How was project management arranged and how effective was it?

Kunai handled project management.

What did you find most impressive about this company?

They were always very quick to send us qualified candidates!

Are there any areas for improvement?

Improve clarity on non-US holiday policy.