GM2

Introduce your business and what you do there.

I am the SVP of D2C technology for a retail and e-commerce agency.

What challenge were you trying to address with GM2?

Our company has undergone multiple mergers and acquisitions over the years, but we’ve had a long-standing relationship with GM2. Since I joined the company six years ago, we've worked on many projects together; GM2 has primarily been supporting us with staff augmentation and web development across a wide variety of clients and technologies.

What was the scope of their involvement?

Almost everything that the staff from GM2 works on for us involves web development. Most recently, they have been working on Shopify and JavaScript development, and data migration. They’ve previously worked with WordPress, Figma, Laravel, Node.js, and provided PHP development. 

For the most part, our team initially develops code base, and then we bring in GM2 to collaborate. 

What is the team composition?

Since I’ve been with the company, we have worked with around 25 people from GM2. These teams have included tech leads, solutions architects, server-side developers, and UI developers that range from junior developers to senior solutions architects. 

How did you come to work with GM2?

We have been working with GM2 since I started with the company, so I’m not sure.   

How much have you invested with them?

We’ve invested about $2 million so far. 

What is the status of this engagement?

We began working with GM2 in April 2010, and the engagement is ongoing.

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

They’ve been helping us effectively deliver work for our clients, and client satisfaction has been high. GM2 has also been helping us maintain our costs and margins internally. 

How did GM2 perform from a project management standpoint?

The project management they provide for us is great. We have weekly meetings with our project manager to discuss project status, staffing, and overall opportunities for improvement. Many of their team members collaborate with our team members and clients, and they always provide excellent communication. 

We use Jira and ClickUp for collaboration. We also use Slack, Zoom, Google Workspace, and Google Meet. 

What did you find most impressive about them?

The team from GM2 cares about our clients as much as we do, and when things are going well they are right there with us celebrating the success. When things aren’t going well, they jump in to help as much as possible. 

Are there any areas they could improve?

Occasionally, our models for delivery are not aligned, which has created challenges. As a services company, we’re limited to what our clients want from us, and it would be helpful if they developed multiple working models and ways of operating. 

Do you have any advice for potential customers?

Get to know the team you’re working with, and treat them as close to the way that you treat your employees as you can. If you do that, they return the favor and bring a high level of passion to their work. They do their best work when asked to contribute their best capabilities rather than just being dictated to.

Please describe your company and your position there.

I am responsible for the product, engineering and operations team at Glisser.

For what projects/services did your company hire GM2, and what were your goals?

We needed a trusted partner to augment our existing team, so that we could accelerate our pace of a specific project, at the same time as we maintained and enhanced our quality.

How did you select this vendor and what were the deciding factors?

GM2 came recommended to us (word-of-mouth) which is always the best way to start off a relationship. After reviewing their credentials, what really set GM2 apart from other candidates was the personal and cultural fit. We felt they indeed would be able to act as an extended team.

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

GM2 helped us to componetize parts of our product experience in React, enabling our customers to consume as much or little of our platform as they require. We scoped the work, adopted an agile and continuous development with regular meeting check-ins and constant day-to-day comms.

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

The team varied, but it was always a project manager, a senior developer, testing and then intermittently additional mid level engineers.

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

We were able to deliver more components with the help of GM2 than we otherwise would have able to do ourselves. And in a shorter timeframe.

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

Very easy-going, thorough and timely.

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

We all really enjoyed the open communication and honest feedback. We never felt like they took advantage of the partnership or introduced any scope creep.

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

We have multilingual talent on our staff, but sometimes the English was hard to understand verbally (for the odd resource). In writing all is absolutely fine. It did not in any way impact the quality if the work though.

Introduce your business and what you do there.

I’m the CTO of Freebird Rides. We’re a mobile platform targeted at consumers aged 21–40, as well as bar and restaurant owners.

For the consumers, it serves as a marketplace for people that want to save money and find awesome places to dine or drink. The merchants can leverage rideshare as a loyalty and user-acquisition tool.

What challenge were you trying to address with GM2?

We needed a team that had expertise with mobile app development, specifically with a platform called React Native. We also needed to quickly find engineers to augment our existing team for additional firepower. We found that with GM2.

What was the scope of their involvement?

GM2 has helped us deliver a release of our mobile application that was ready for both Android and iOS. We took an existing app that was built on a different platform and changed it to a new platform called React Native, which was the main framework. We had to maintain feature completeness and port performance, as well as develop the Android app because we had an iOS-only app.

The app development has required heavy TypeScript skills and a lot of mobile app development tools usage. We’ve implemented heavy integration with our API to serve up offers that are geo-targeted to the user. We’ve also integrated the app with our rideshare partners, Uber and Lyft, and it has required heavy usage of mapping and geo-libraries provided by Google. On top of that, we’ve made sure to accomplish this complex task with a beautiful design.

Once the deadline for the project was met, we retained one of the engineers. This person has been one of our best and longest-standing engineers to date. Currently, GM2 provides maintenance services and helps us with ongoing developments.

What is the team composition?

At the peak of the development, we work with three engineers. Two of them are React Native mobile app developers, so they’re very JavaScript- and TypeScript- oriented. The other one is a backend developer and helps us with our Node.js backend.

How did you come to work with GM2?

I’ve had a very long-standing relationship with GM2. I’ve worked with them over the course of two different companies that I’ve led. My previous relationship with them was at my former company, where we partnered with them to do a lot of different developments.

Originally, I found them through a referral within our network, and they became the largest provider of our development services. Thanks to that past relationship, when I formed this new company, GM2 was the first company I reached out to get additional developers from.

How much have you invested with them?

We’ve spent over $200,000.

What is the status of this engagement?

We started working together on this project about three years ago, close to June 2018. The app was launched around four months later, but they stayed as an effective part of our team.

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

The app they have helped us build at peak has 200,000–250,000 users a month, and it’s facilitating around 150,000 transactions or rides, in our case, a month.

GM2 was able to spin up fast and get a critical deadline met. So far, they’ve been hitting all the deadlines that we have put in place. Also, I do a very careful code review of all of our engineers' work, and GM2 has satisfied all my code quality standards.

Collaboration and communication is a strong metric of success for me as well. GM2 is able to communicate clearly about the right assets at the right time — they collaborate effectively, and they’ve exceeded all those measures.

How did GM2 perform from a project management standpoint?

As GM2 provides staff augmentation for this project, our project managers take care of their resources. Their developers easily fit into our existing project management structure and team workflow.

We use Jira, Slack, and GitHub for communication because they’re not working on site.

What did you find most impressive about them?

The level of commitment GM2 has on the project exceeded our expectations. They take ownership of the work that they’re doing and push to create something that they’re proud of. GM2 elevated our platform’s quality and standards.

Are there any areas they could improve?

GM2 is doing their job really well. I can’t think of anything they could improve on.

Any advice for potential customers?

The clearer you are about the requirements, the better the collaboration is. As with every other team, GM2 does a better job if the client really knows what they need and how to communicate it.

Please describe your company and your position there.

I am the Managing Partner of a technology investment fund, and former Director of Technology for a leading LA based digital marketing firm. Our fund invests in technology companies, and we bring a C-Suite to the equation to enact meaningful forward movement.

For what projects/services did your company hire GM2, and what were your goals?

One of our portfolio companies had a vision and plan to execute a drastic change to the real estate industry by integrating a robust, custom UX flow in order to allow home owners to sell their homes by owner, but still gain the benefit of having a real estate 'agent' assist in the more tedious aspects of inspections and form filing.

The goal was to allow everyday homeowners the opportunity to fully list their home for sale by owner, but have that home syndicated nationally on the MLS as well as 3rd-party platforms like Zillow and Redfin.

How did you select GM2 and what were the deciding factors?

I worked closely with the Director, who ensured at every step of the initial pitch process that they had the experience, professionalism, and acumen to complete the project on time and in many cases, with more thought leadership from their team.

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

They designed and developed a custom user flow for listing your home on the MLS and having that syndicated nationally. This was insanely complex, as anyone that has purchased or sold a home can attest, the forms and processes involved are anything but "user friendly".

The forms and questionnaires, as well as all of the disclosures and signatures had to be condensed into a consumable form, and the GM2 team did this in spectacular fashion. They constructed a step-based system by which a user could start, stop, and resume the process at any time, as well as consolidated many of the hundreds of duplicitous and/or conditional information items that were to be collected.

They used a Laravel framework backend, hosted on a scalable AWS Fargate managed service with a Vue.js frontend.

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

In total, I believe there were about 8-10 people from GM2 involved with the project, including a stellar project manager, UX and design team, and a lead developer with his team of backend and frontend engineers. As well, we were well looked after by GM2's Managing Director, who would frequently join our meetings to ensure smooth communication and client feedback was being heard.

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

The project timeline was adhered to very closely, and we were given advanced warning of any yellow flags that might hinder the timeline and the project being delayed -- which fortunately it was not.

The design and UX team cannot be commended enough on the monumental task that they had to overcome in translating literally hundreds of poorly worded, duplicative, and sometimes incoherent questions that are required for a home to be listed on the California MLS.

Finally, it should be noted that while the business was still operating with this model, only they used humans for data collection. After the launch of this automated system for data collection and initial payment collection, with proper advertising, lead generation went up by many orders of magnitude and the pipeline was able to be serviced at a much later initial starting point.

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

The project manager, and the entire team at GM2 were very accommodating during the development of the project. They acquiesced to every request we had from using Slack for inter-company communications, using Figma for collaborative UX and design review, and using a client-facing ticketing system to be able to track change requests and other tasks important to the stakeholders.

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

The ability for GM2's team to pivot, change tactics, respond to client feedback and have something in front of us extremely fast that reflected those requests - this applied to UX, design, and development.

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

Being an Argentina based team, I was unsure if the language barrier was going to be an issue. Fortunately, almost the entirety of their team is bilingual, and quite well versed in colloquial and industry jargon in English, so integration was quite easy. There were a few times that a team member had trouble, but this is understandable at this level.

Please describe your company and your position there.

I was the CEO of AirMap, where we built an air traffic control for drones.

For what projects/services did your company hire GM2, and what were your goals?

We needed to augment our front-end development team with additional skills and capacity. GM2 was so successful for us that we completely replaced our internal team with GM2 and then we extended the project to include key back-end tasks.

How did you select this vendor and what were the deciding factors?

GM2 surfaced as part of our research in outsourcing partners. They had good reviews and showed very strong in the interview process. We also liked that they were in a similar timezone.

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

The front-end was in React.

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

We had a full team of project managers, architects, software developers and testing. I recall the team scaled up to over 10 people.

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

We met the very stringent project requirements.

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

We used slack and jira.

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

The team was very committed and brought strong project management skills.

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

n/a