Engenious

BACKGROUND

Please describe your company and position.

 I am the Engineering Manager of a software company 

Describe what your company does in a single sentence.

Our company is a writing assistant software that helps improve the quality of written communication.

OPPORTUNITY / CHALLENGE

What specific goals or objectives did you hire Engenious to accomplish?

• Cover business as usual work from the marketing team
• Improve test coverage and quality on repos

SOLUTION

How did you find Engenious?

Referral

Why did you select Engenious over others?

• Pricing fit our budget
• Referred to me

How many teammates from Engenious were assigned to this project?

2-5 Employees

Describe the scope of work in detail. Please include a summary of key deliverables.

• Create, update, and refactor components within the web application to enhance performance and ensure consistency across the platform.
• Develop and integrate experiments to optimize user experience and support data-driven decision-making.
• Export and process data from WordPress to streamline content management and improve data handling efficiency.
• Update and improve blog category routing to enhance navigation and content discoverability within the web application.

RESULTS & FEEDBACK

What were the measurable outcomes from the project that demonstrate progress or success?

• Task completion and quality - were tasks assigned to engineers completed successfully and within the estimated timeframe. Were there bugs shipped / created from the team's work
• Autonomy of execution - were engineers able to communicate with stakeholders independently to drive their work forward?

Describe their project management. Did they deliver items on time? How did they respond to your needs?

• Timely delivery - this has been mixed. One engineer has been great at ramping up their velocity and consistently can deliver on time, while the other often needs support to get things out. 
• Responding to needs - I think Engenious' account representatives have been great at anticipating and responding to the needs of the team. They have provided some valuable suggestions to improve processes and staffing. Additionally, they have shared feedback with the engi,neers on the team and created action items.

What was your primary form of communication with Engenious?

Email or Messaging App

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

I think the account management has been very useful and attentive. The team is also able to source candidates and present resumes at a good velocity when we discussed expanding the scope or hiring a different contractor.

We were able to hire candidates quickly which got us out of a resource crunch, which was also great. Overall, engineers coming from Engenious have been decent, but have taken much longer to ramp up, and are much less proactive on task completion compared to FTEs we hired.

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

I'd like to see how and where Engenious account rep and EM on their side have the right amount of context for tasks and can help manage performance of web developers on their end. When we've flagged this feedback they have been responsive, but I'd like to see more instances of proactivity here.

One great case of proactivity was suggesting hiring an SDET instead of the currently staffed SDE

BACKGROUND

Please describe your company and position.

I am the CTO of a software company.

Describe what your company does in a single sentence.

Build AI solutions for consumer products

OPPORTUNITY / CHALLENGE

What specific goals or objectives did you hire Engenious to accomplish?

Develop our Android mobile application

SOLUTION

How did you find Engenious?

Referral

Why did you select Engenious over others?

• Pricing fit our budget
• Great culture fit
• Good value for cost
• Referred to me
• Company values aligned

How many teammates from Engenious were assigned to this project?

2-5 Employees

Describe the scope of work in detail. Please include a summary of key deliverables.

Develop the Android application for our AI centered product. The key deliverable was the application. 
Since we are a very early stage starup, we have been itterating on the product in parallel, and building drastically different 3 versions of the product in the span og this collaboration. 
Inside of the application the users are able to communicate with the AI, using the microphone, and natural language in order to develop their Newsletter emails to send to their subscribers

RESULTS & FEEDBACK

What were the measurable outcomes from the project that demonstrate progress or success?

Developed the app in a very short time frame
Pivoted 2 times in order to keep up with the company's product strategy
Understanding and integrations of more than 25 API endpoints into the project
Development of more than 15 screens in the project
Full development of the onboarding flow, and the main screens.
Full development of the profile page.
Incredible agility of the developers, and project managers.
Development speed, and brevity in meetings, and road map strategies. 
Visual road map and clarity across every stage

Describe their project management. Did they deliver items on time? How did they respond to your needs?

Very quick delivery. We used Loom, Slack, and Google Meet ot sync-up and stay up-to-date and we dind't loose a single day in the miscommunication even with a 7-9 hour time zone differences. 
Visual road map, and clear targets for the week and the days helped a lot with keeping the whole team on the same page. Towards the end of the development getting daily/semi-daily builds to test was crucial!

What was your primary form of communication with Engenious?

• Virtual Meeting
• Email or Messaging App

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

Clarity of communication, the speed and adaptability to the ever changing startup requirements, and pro-activeness with the keen eye on design, and UX.

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

I think the Engenious team did incredible work with this project; I wouldn't change a thing!