Evojam

Please describe your company and your position there.

Otro Global Limited was a funded startup delivering sports entertainment and Social engagement platform for the worlds leading football stars. My position was initially Head of Engineering and later Interim CTO

For what projects/services did your company hire Evojam, and what were your goals?

As a part of the platform ecosystem Evojam were tasked with developing the backend Content Management System. They provided a range of capabilities, mainly REACT developers and project management.

How did you select Evojam and what were the deciding factors?

Selection was based on the following; Capability and skill set Ability to start fast Being agile and flexible in their approach to the project Reliability Providing cost effective resources

Describe the scope of work in detail, including the project steps, key deliverables, and technologies used.

Evojam were presented with an early prototype of the solution and tasked with building a production grade framework and then evolve the features and functionality towards a completed solution. Direction from Otro side was somewhat disorganised in the early stages without formal Product Management, receiving verbal requirements on daily standup.

Evojam self-organised within a formal agile methodology framework from the outset. The delivery was managed in 2 week sprints working from a backlog developed by Evojam in Jira. As the project evolved a more formal Product Management led process was introduced with key milestones defined.

The principle activities where developing the CMS UI in REACT and integrating with Java containerised micro service / Kafka based backend. The MVP was successfully delivered in under 10 months and further enhanced over remaining months of the project.

How many people from the vendor's team worked with you, and what were their positions?

Four/Five developers led by SCRUM Master / PM with occasional involvement of UX designer and Evojam's CTO.

Can you share any measurable outcomes of the project or general feedback about the deliverables?

The project delivery followed a very aggressive timeline of inception to launch in less than 1 year for a very large scale and complex tech stack. Evojam proved to be well organised, infinitely patient and demonstrated a high-level of competence. The project was delivered in time for the desired launch date and provided the required functionality to manage the Otro service.

Describe their project management style, including communication tools and timelines.

Evojam followed a formal agile (SCRUM) based approach to delivering the project, this included all critical ceremonies. and properly structured backlog and sprint management. Communication, led by their PM, was excellent at all times with the appropriate level of escalation when required.

The entire Otro engineering group were highly distributed and communications was managed via Zoom and Slack, Jira and Confluence were used for backlog, sprint and documentation management.

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

Beyond their obvious technical competence and excellent organisational skills, Evojam demonstrated a remarkable level of flexibility and patience. The early stage of the project was somewhat chaotic on the Otro side and little time could be invested by the Otro team in providing proper requirements and direction.

Despite this, Evojam self-organised around the little direction provided and focussed on delivering the best possible outcome for Otro.

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

Nothing that comes to mind, this was a challenging project and Evojam responded positively to secure a successful outcome.

Please describe your company and your position there.

Enthought provides technology-enabled solutions that deliver applied digital innovation to transform science-based businesses. I manage the Platform Development team, who provide many of the basic tools that Enthought developers and our customers use to succeed.

For what projects/services did your company hire Evojam?

For two projects. First, we needed a modern front end for a critical tool used for software deployment, which only had a command-line interface. That project went so well that we asked Evojam to also develop a replacement for an older Qt-based software development IDE, by writing an extension for Visual Studio Code.

What were your goals for this project?

For the deployment tool, to allow use by non-expert users without becoming proficient with the command line; for the VS Code extension, to provide a smooth onboarding experience for customers attending our training sessions. An additional goal was to address user-submitted enhancement requests and bug reports over time.

How did you select this vendor?

We compiled a list of candidates based on word-of-mouth, referrals, and online reviews. Evojam was selected because of their experience using React and related web technologies, but more importantly because they had a documented history of working with customers to develop complex projects, instead of simply taking low-level technical direction.

Describe the project and the services they provided in detail.

The deployment tool front end was implemented in React by an Evojam developer and underwent some additional testing/validation at Enthought, before being bundled with the tool for distribution to our customers.

The VS Code extension was likewise developed by Evojam and validated/shipped by Enthought. Collaboration was via private GitHub repositories in Enthought's organization. Technologies involved were Javascript/React, Electron/Node.js, some Python.

What was the team composition?

On the Enthought side, one contact person (myself) with occasional feedback from Enthought support and operations. On the Evojam side, one dedicated developer, one project manager at fractional time, and additional fractional time from another developer to perform code review.

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

Both products were shipped on-time and on-budget, and were well-received by stakeholders, both within Enthought and at our customers. The code base is of good quality and should not prove difficult to maintain going forward.

How was project management arranged and how effective was it?

Project management was highly effective, mainly because the Evojam developers could work from high-level direction, and asked questions appropriately. Although Enthought provided the original spec document for both tools, the project was collaborative with Evojam providing good technical insight and good options when decisions needed to be made.

What did you find most impressive about this company?

The degree to which Enthought was able to be "hands off" with development. We provided initial spec documents for both products; there was one regular meeting per week, plus occasional response/clarification to GitHub issues and testing/QA of the artifacts. Going in I was prepared to spend much more time on oversight, but it quickly became clear that wasn't needed.

Are there any areas for improvement?

I can't think of any.

Please describe your company and your position there.

We consult and provide software/design engineering services to funded startups.

For what projects/services did your company hire Evojam?

Custom software development building a Global platform.

What were your goals for this project?

Many different and evolving goals over 5 years, from early-stage software development to supporting a global platform.

How did you select this vendor?

Great reputation and past experience.

Describe the project and the services they provided in detail.

Evojam helped building a global source-to-contract platform where buyers can match their business to the best suppliers. Our team supported and built the Project Brief, Matching Tool and Proposals which allows buyers to compare different suppliers and have suppliers create different proposals to match the buyers need.

What was the team composition?

Varied over 5 years, but a full PM, Engineering, and QA team.

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

Evojam was critical to the development and success of this product. They always take care to be professional consultants and make the correct important decisions.

How was project management arranged and how effective was it?

Project Management was very stable, reliable, and with excellent communication. This was one of the strongest points that contributed to project success.

What did you find most impressive about this company?

That they can be trusted to work unmanaged and make all the right decisions.

Are there any areas for improvement?

None

Introduce your business and what you do there.

I’m a former senior program manager for a company that tracks what people are watching on TV to create customized advertising plans for customers.

What challenge were you trying to address with Evojam?

We needed a partner to work on some dev projects.

What was the scope of their involvement?

Evojam both augmented our internal staff and also worked on separate tasks. They used Scala Spark and SQL and implemented an ETL process to pull in data from various sources. The process checked for errors in the data or spots where our quality standards weren’t meant, then we had accession processes to deal with those problems.

They also moved our data into an s3 data lake with Snowflake, allowing it to be queried and scalable. We use a variety of AWS tools to kill queries after a certain amount of time to maintain quality. The most recent project Evojam has worked on is a customer-facing app for businesses that allow them to query the data in a fast and robust way. They built that in Python.

What is the team composition?

We work with 12 people, including DevOps engineers, frontend developers, and two project managers.

How did you come to work with Evojam?

We had multiple companies write code for a certain project, and we compared the results to see who did the best work. Evojam won, so we hired them.

How much have you invested with them?

We spend about $1 million a year.

What is the status of this engagement?

We partnered in December 2017, and the work is ongoing.

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

When I started working here, we were four months past due on some client deliverables. After hiring Evojam, we had a 400% increase in our deliverable dates. That’s not all due to them, but they had a big role in improving that number. It was an incredibly successful relationship.

How did Evojam perform from a project management standpoint?

I talked to the engineers and engineer managers about every 2­–4 weeks. The workflow was a bit difficult at first, but we eventually worked it all out. They were good communicators, even with the different time zones, and were flexible and accommodating.

What did you find most impressive about them?

They’re unfailingly honest, have high-quality work, and communicate well.

Are there any areas they could improve?

They’re slow to hire new developers, but it’s because they have high standards. They should also be more structured and organized on a management level.

Do you have any advice for future clients of theirs?

Have a lawyer that can handle the business and legal aspects of the partnership. You want someone who can write contracts that protect both of you.

Introduce your business and what you do there.

I’m the co-founder and the CTO of Cleeng and we’re active in subscriber retention management. We help companies—mostly in the media space—manage their subscribers around the world.

What challenge were you trying to address with Evojam?

We have a versatile product suite around retention management but had a need to do active session control of playback in the broadcasting sector. That kind of technology is fairly challenging because of scalability issues.

We needed a trusted vendor to create an architecture and develop a platform module to actively monitor and control more than 200,000 concurrent user sessions for video playback.

What was the scope of their involvement?

We required a specific feature for active searching control of end users. The user can have one or two streams, depending on the settings, so the technology had to be extremely scalable. We asked Evojam to come up with the right architecture.

On top of that, we wanted it to be based on the AWS stack as much as possible. They developed the client-side applications that need to be integrated within the apps of our clients, as well as the complex backend. That was fully based on a serverless architecture of AWS, Lambda.

What is the team composition?

We had two leads—one architectural lead and one developer lead. The architectural lead was also the one who structured the project, with two more specialized developers involved.

How did you come to work with Evojam?

We put out a simple RFP and reached out to multiple companies that claimed to be good in scalability solutions. We did a few interviews and Evojam was the main one that we liked. We trusted them as they were very proactive in coming up with an architectural direction.

How much have you invested with them?

Altogether, it’s close to $80,000.

What is the status of this engagement?

We started working with Evojam in July 2018 and the work is ongoing.

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

They definitely mastered our technical complexity and helped us widen our product portfolio. Our system will be used by one of the largest Danish matches that’s broadcasted online.

How did Evojam perform from a project management standpoint?

We were happy about their level of responsiveness, documentation, and communication. Especially in the beginning, they really impressed us with their professionalism and how they approached the project; their proactive drive on shaping the project and putting the clear deliverables out there to verify was great.

What did you find most impressive about them?

We managed to quickly establish a good, trusting relationship. When working with vendors, trust is a key component. They always made clear plans and estimations and were able to deliver on all their commitments, resulting in a very good relationship.

Are there any areas they could improve?

They could escalate a bit further sometimes, within our company. When things got a bit stuck—even for good reason—they didn’t feel empowered to escalate further, even when we were otherwise engaged. They should stay proactive and escalate to the next level.

Do you have any advice for future clients of theirs?

No.

Please describe your company and your position there.

I’m the founder and CEO of Convose. We’re building a chat platform app to help people around the world learn English via conversations.

For what projects/services did your company hire Evojam?

We engaged Evojam to build an application in React Native.

What were your goals for this project?

We wanted to launch our platform soon to gain first users and find investors. We would grow our userbase from there.

How did you select this vendor?

I either found them through a referral from a friend or through a Google search for development agencies. I'm not quite sure.

Describe the project and the services they provided in detail.

Evojam helped develop the platform alongside my existing team of developers.

What was the team composition?

We work with two developers and a senior developer who oversees the project and our relationship.

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

While we have yet to launch and find our first major investment, Evojam has helped speed up our development significantly. They produced clean code quickly, and I’ve recommended their team to others.

How was project management arranged and how effective was it?

I served as project manager to keep in close contact with the developers, review their changes, and give feedback right away. However, Evojam offered a project manager who I could trust and ask for advice.

What did you find most impressive about this company?

The Evojam team understood our platform and our goals and invested themselves in our success. They also delivered high-quality, efficient code and a contract that inspires trust and security in me. I look forward to continuing our engagement in the future.

Are there any areas for improvement?

Occasionally, the team didn’t follow the designs as closely as I would like. However, they were quick and eager to fix issues that I brought to their attention.

Introduce your business and what you do there.

I’m the co-founder and CEO of a software startup. We’re building a software as a service (SaaS) platform for industrial companies to create, manage, and analyze their operative workflows. Instead of printing out paper documentation and workflows, we let industrial companies build their processes via an intuitive, drag-and-drop interface, which makes them available on tablets, smartphones, and smart glasses.

What challenge were you trying to address with Evojam?

We already had the core of our platform but we needed help developing enhancements and building small modules that would add additional functionality.

What was the scope of their involvement?

At the beginning, they supported our team in developing an image editor that lets you upload a picture to our platform and work with it, which is hard to do, in terms of choosing the right web technologies and toolsets.We also provided them with user stories for the whole feature—20 of them—that explained how the feature should work. Finally, we spoke about what the UX, user flow, and workflow of our platform should be like and they started to build it.

What is the team composition?

There were two frontend developers, one UX/UI resource, and a project manager.

How did you come to work with Evojam?

I did research on European agencies that could help us, but it’s hard to find good people that are focused on specific technologies in Germany and Europe. We chose Evojam because we needed experts in the Angular 6 framework.

What is the status of this engagement?

We’ve been working together since July 2017.

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

We’ve gotten positive feedback from our clients about the UX/UI, and everyone is happy with the frontend work they’ve done. Our developers were able to learn about specific technologies and consume the knowledge they offered us, and their team leader worked with us to find ways to improve both the project and our internal processes. They over-perform our expectations, so we keep extending the project.

How did Evojam perform from a project management standpoint?

They’re very responsive, so I’d get a response within 30 minutes, usually over Skype. The project manager managed their team’s specific tasks on a daily basis and communicated with us once or twice a day, showing us new things that were being built and asking for feedback, which he’d provide to the team. They held both daily standup meetings, to discuss current issues, and retrospective, feedback sessions that allowed us to find improvements together, for both the project and our own processes.

They’re flexible with how they work so we tried different work styles. They worked by themselves at first, providing updates twice a week on how the feature was looking—what was still missing, and what its status was. They used an iterative process where they provided us with code to test and give feedback on, which was factored into the next round. After that project, we asked for more immediate support because we were working on issues that were deep in our core technology. They agreed to change their style and work with our developers on a daily basis.

What did you find most impressive about them?

We have a special relationship with them. I call them a boutique agency because they’re good with their technology and they offer their expertise to the client in a good way. They’re small, but they know what they’re doing.

Do you have any advice for potential customers?

Always think about how communication can be improved to stay close to their team. If there’s anything that could be a roadblock, communicate about it. We learned a lot about good communication from the example they set.

Please describe your company and your position there.

I'm the COO of a software company that builds industry tools to support customer needs. 

For what projects/services did your company hire Evojam?

We hired them to build a rapid prototype that could test our process control and our product platform. 

What were your goals for this project?

We needed a rapid prototype that we could pass to our internal team for further development.

How did you select this vendor?

We selected them after an internal review, discussions with them, and a comparison to other providers. 

Can you go into detail about the services they provided and the scope of the project?

They provided full end-to-end scrum and project management, including the tech stack and design.

What was the team composition?

The team included a Scrum master and four to six developers, depending on the complexity of the workload. When necessary, they scaled up the number of developers.

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

The team was fantastic. They enabled us to iterate quickly and bring the prototype to life. That built interest with potential clients and investors.

How was project management arranged and how effective was it?

They handled project managment and scheduled daily calls to ensure process. Once or twice weekly, we scoped the project to ensure that the backlog was correct.

What did you find most impressive about this company?

Their flexible, dynamic thinking was fantastic. They proposed solutions whenever they found a problem.

Are there any areas where they can improve?

No, the team and their tools were great.