Effective

Introduce your business and what you do there.

I’m the VP of product for ProductHired, a professional hiring platform.

What challenge were you trying to address with Effective?

We were looking for an engineering team, skilled in Node.js and React, to work on our platform. We also needed a team that could help us make architectural decisions. 

What was the scope of their involvement?

Effective worked with us from the beginning. They’ve built everything on our platform. The team created crawlers to find jobs on other platforms, clean the data, and display it on our site. They also created a Slack bot and integrated our event page with platforms like Meetup.com and Eventbrite. 

Aside from the development work, Effective works in collaboration with our designers, which we contract from another vendor. 

We’re currently working on a coaching marketplace, where users can find coaches to help them interview better and progress in their career.

What is the team composition?

We work with quarter-, half-, and full-time employees, about six in total in different capacities. We have a central project manager who works with the developers to make sure everything is completed on time.

How did you come to work with Effective?

I worked at another company that used Effective, and I created a really great relationship with them. Two years later, when I started at ProductHired, I knew I wanted Effective to work on my project. I went directly to them because of their professionalism, because they get things done, and because they’re pixel perfect.

How much have you invested with them?

We spend on average about $5,000 per month.

What is the status of this engagement?

Our engagement started about two years ago, in June 2018.

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

Effective provided the wisdom we were looking for. Often, we’ll come up with an idea of what we want to do, and they’ll be able to provide feedback about whether or not it’s the best way to do it. They do research and come back with options. 

Working with Effective, I can always say that our features are always better than when we first come up with them. They’re fantastic at making our products efficient, and they do it quickly. The team doesn’t just do what I tell them — they think about what’s asked of them, and sometimes they push back, which is exactly what I want from them.

How did Effective perform from a project management standpoint?

Effective is great with project management. Our project manager is our main point of contact, and he performs really well. He’s good at keeping us within budget and always gives us a warning when we’re coming up against it so we can either scale back or move forward. They keep us really well informed. 

They’re in a different time zone than us, which our project manager handles really effectively. He’ll stay up late to make sure we have everything we need, which is a flexibility I really appreciate. It feels like Effective is an extension of our own team.

What did you find most impressive about them?

They’re effective — that’s why they’re called Effective. I’ve worked with many development teams, and I always wonder if it’s going to get done. With Effective, I’ve never questioned whether the project will be completed. They always work really hard and they always get it right. 

Effective thinks about the architecture, so we can be flexible and extendable when it comes to our platform. That’s one of the reasons why we really like working with them — they always think ahead and keep our future success in mind. 

Are there any areas they could improve?

If there was ever a rough spot, they always worked to fix it. I can’t say anything negative against them, because any time there’s ever been an issue, Effective has always worked really hard to make it right. They’re awesome. 

Do you have any advice for potential customers?

Give Effective the full picture. They’re a team that really thinks about the future of the product, so the more information the better. They have a wisdom within their organization that they can leverage to make your product really successful.

Please describe your company and your position there.

We're a digital design agency working with Fortune 500 incumbents and innovative startups to launch new experiences, brands, and products.

For what projects/services did your company hire Effective?

We were looking for a long-term software development partner with whom we could build digital products for our clients. We maintain minimal technology staff in our headquarters and rely on well-established partnerships with our software development partners to execute on projects with high effectiveness and quality. The ability to build products of high quality was critical to successful engagements with our clients.

What were your goals for this project?

The digital products we were looking to build usually included mobile (iOS, Android) development, Front End, and Back End (incl. Database, API) development. Most of which were green-field projects and needed to be built with a set of modern languages and frameworks.

How did you select this vendor?

We've been evaluating companies in Eastern Europe and Effective stood out for a number of reasons. Reasonable rates, ability to create an overlap in working hours (we were looking for a 4-hour overlap in CST), technical leadership.

We weren't interested in pure "staff augmentation", – we needed the partner who can bring their insights and know-how to building products, and could effectively project-manage the technical portion of projects. Of course, we were looking for strong talent and effective in-team communication with English language proficiency. Effective checked all these boxes.

Describe the project and the services they provided in detail.

With most projects, Effective were involved in early Discover and Planning activities, as we were starting engaging with our client – Effective was defining the architecture, identifying risks and working with us to mitigate those risks. Our approach to discovery and research is pretty extensive – and Effective was a great tech partner to bounce ideas off of and validate some technical assumptions we would make. Moving onto the production phase, we worked with Effective in an agile fashion, planning out the sprints collaboratively. Effective would review the designs that we produce for each sprint of work ahead of time and provide the feedback for our design team to address.

Effective, in general, was able to be autonomous when needed and would provide us with reports of the work accomplished – in addition to shared access to JIRA and other tools used in managing the projects. Lastly, Effective would launch the products (from a technical sense) – do the necessary set up of the Production environment to post-launch support.

Some projects we worked on together had long-term, 2-3 year long post-initial-launch maintenance-and-iteration phases where Effective was executing on the development portion of the work.

What was the team composition?

Team size was varied based on the needs of projects – from as little as a Tech Lead, Web Developer and QA, to a larger team with a Tech Lead, 2-3 Web Developers, 2-3 Mobile Developers, 1-2 QA.

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

The quality, efficiency, and cost-effectiveness of working with Effective allowed us to close more business that would have an Implementation component, and gain repeat business with clients for whom we built the products. Peace of mind from having a partner on whom we can rely on was a big deal for us, as well.

How was project management arranged and how effective was it?

The Effective team members we worked with worked together in teams in the past, and we had some decent predictability in velocity and what the teams would accomplish.

A Tech Lead on Effective's side was the point of accountability, and would lead the efforts of producing estimates, communicating any possible risks, and then reporting on progress. Individual developers were in common Slack with our design team members for effective peer-to-peer collaboration. Everything was tracked either in JIRA or Trello.

Team Lead had excellent English, most of the developers were able to converse verbally with our team members on video calls, as well.

What did you find most impressive about this company?

Direct, honest communication. Clear expectation setting. Openness to feedback and the desire to always be improving. Strong talent. Their team is comprised of happy people with whom we genuinely enjoyed working.

Are there any areas for improvement?

It took us some time, but we had to work out the most productive process for dealing with time zone differences. What ended up working best was some hours of overlap with the whole team, and the Tech Lead available even further. With advance notice, we could have team members be available later than usual.

Introduce your business and what you do there.

I’m the owner and CEO of Stellar Solvers, a tech firm. We do custom application development primarily in the area of machine learning, augmented reality, mobile applications, and custom enterprise systems.

What challenge were you trying to address with Effective?

We were experiencing some rapid growth and needed additional help with the number of projects we were trying to process, as we didn’t have enough internal resources.

What was the scope of their involvement?

We created a team of people from their side and they essentially became part of our team. Effective has also picked up some projects and managed them completely on their own, though the majority of our engagements have followed the staff augmentation model. 

We’ve collaborated on several projects. One of the main areas of support we’ve required from them are innovative products in mobile development and AR. We originally created a playground app that would serve as a proof of concept to our customers, which could include functionalities from image recognition based search, chat boards, video chat, or virtual try-on. 

Effective provided some technicians and scientists who were involved in the engineering of the product. They do mobile and web development, working in C++ and other technologies. According to the need, we’ve been able to adapt and use the appropriate stack.

What is the team composition?

There are around 40 people on their team helping us on dozens of projects. However, I personally work closely with two people. 

How did you come to work with Effective?

I considered multiple companies after conducting an online search and receiving some word-of-mouth connections. A vendor we worked with previously recommended Effective. After talking to them initially, I decided they would be the best fit. 

How much have you invested with them?

We’ve spent over $1,000,000.

What is the status of this engagement?

We started working together in October 2018. Though COVID-19 has definitely slowed things down, we still have plenty of work which Effective continues to support us with.

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

We’ve seen significant growth since working with Effective. When we started, we had a US-based team of about seven people, and another smaller team in Russia that we weren’t able to grow as rapidly. We were working on a single project with about five or six representatives from their team.

Within six months, our workforce tripled, and within another six months, it tripled again. We’re working with multiple dozens of members from Effective now. The growth we’ve seen in the last two years has been absolutely spectacular.

How did Effective perform from a project management standpoint?

Project management has been a learning experience for both sides. We’ve had to adjust to the demands of our customers, and get used to the time difference. It’s a process that’s involved a lot of flexibility with project management resources, but we’ve been able to work together to find creative solutions. 

We use Jira and GitLab, and we’ve recently transitioned to Microsoft Teams and DevOps Azure to manage our work.

What did you find most impressive about them?

Effective’s engineering is excellent. They create beautiful, high-level code that would pass any scrutiny. They’re a team of very strong, established engineers. 

Another thing that sets their team apart is that they’ve very creative. Their team of designers helps us to deliver a range of ideas both internally and to our customers. Their expertise lies not just in the creation of the UI/UX, but also thinking through use cases and how their work will help the customer.

Are there any areas they could improve?

We reached a point where they started struggling to source people as we went into an area that’s not necessarily their expertise. 

Do you have any advice for potential customers?

Trust Effective; they know what they’re doing. When you relax a little bit and let them do their work, you’ll realize they’re the experts. Unleash them and use their talents to the fullest. 

Also, decide really clearly whether you’re going into outsourcing versus staff augmentation and how you want it to work. They’re two different things and you need to be very clear.