Gorilla Logic

Introduce your business and what you do there.

We make SaaS products in the energy industry. I’m the VP of software engineering. 

What challenge were you trying to address with Gorilla Logic?

We were trying to ramp up our development capacity. We’re converting our products from an older version of delivery — flash player-based — to a web-based delivery using a browser model.

What was the scope of their involvement?

Gorilla Logic provided additional capacity to help us rewrite an application. We ported it from older technologies that were written about a decade ago and migrated it to the web. We gave them general information about our company, infrastructure, and products.

What is the team composition?

They provided agile teams that had developers, testers, and project managers. At our height, we worked with seven people, including six on an agile team and then an independent developer.

How did you come to work with Gorilla Logic?

Our CEO knew another company that had used them.

How much have you invested with them?

We’ve spent roughly $500,000.

What is the status of this engagement?

Our work together began in August 2019, and we’re still working with them. The original contract is completing at the end of this month, August 2020.

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

They have certainly accomplished quite a lot of work. In general, the engineers that they provided were pretty high-quality, and they did great work. Overall, we’re not terribly satisfied with the engagement. I don’t know that it’s their fault; I think this was probably a bad model for a company of our size. We did a good job of making the best of it, and we don’t hold this against any of the individuals, as they were all high-quality resources.

They were pretty responsive to our issues, but we’re a small company. It was really hard to train six developers and then oversee them in a product that is core to our business. If you have something tangential to your business and can separate it as a distinct thing, that’s a good target for outsourcing. We don’t have anything like that, and if we do, we've already outsourced it.

How did Gorilla Logic perform from a project management standpoint?

We had some issues with the project management. Their scrum master wasn’t a very assertive or communicative individual. They didn’t speak up or push to defend the process when there were process issues. Had we continued in that model, we probably would have tried to address it by replacing the project manager.

They had something called a sprint zero in the beginning. One of their people came on site and looked at our servers. I believe they allocated about a week’s worth of time. We didn’t find that terribly effective or helpful, as it’s not possible to give somebody enough information to work on our products.

The engineers themselves were engaged in an agile team. At some points, we had our own engineers on the team with them, so they had daily standups via Slack video conferencing call or the equivalent. Slack was the primary means of engagement with them. We also used our ticketing system, Jira. I’m sure we used email as well.

What did you find most impressive about them?

They were able to ramp a team relatively quickly. I’m not sure it was quite as fast as advertised, which was that they had a deep bench of people in Costa Rica. We initially got the notion that there were lots of people training at Gorilla Labs, and we could get a big team relatively quickly. It turned out that almost all of the people in Costa Rica were staffed on projects, and they were trying to grow a Colombian presence. I believe that every single engineer we worked with was a new hire for Gorilla Logic in Colombia. That took longer than advertised, but it was certainly faster than we could’ve done.

They did a really good job vetting the people that they brought us. We got a team of qualified engineers relatively rapidly, without a lot of work on our part. Getting those qualified engineers quickly was probably the biggest standout in terms of the service that they provided. 

Are there any areas they could improve?

I think they need to vet customers a bit more. They should’ve questioned whether or not we were a good fit for them. I know they want to sell services, but the underlying mismatch was that we just weren’t a great fit for them in terms of the work that we wanted to do with them. At that point, we didn’t have enough experience with this model to know that. It would’ve been nice if somebody like them would know that; however, I do think that Gorilla Logic tends to work with much larger companies, so they might not have had that experience, either. 

Any advice for potential customers?

They should try and find something that’s pretty separable from their core business, such as an independent, stand-alone project. I think they’ll function the best if you can just hand it off to them and hold them accountable for delivery.

Introduce your business and what you do there.

I’m a product manager at Gaia, an SVOD (subscription video on demand) service featuring niche content in consciousness, yoga, and meditation verticals. I run the day-to-day and some of the future work planning of the teams that work on all of the app platforms that Gaia produces, which includes iOS, Android, Roku, and Fire TV.

What challenge were you trying to address with Gorilla Logic?

If you don’t live in one of the major metropolitan areas — and even if you do — it can be really competitive to get mobile developers to join your team. It’s hard to find developers that are talented enough to maintain your product and create it at a high-level.

We went to Gorilla Logic because we needed to pull in talented mobile developers. We also hired them for cost and reliability factors. We had previously been working with a couple of different groups to produce the apps, and we wanted to consolidate that under one organization. We were looking to add people to our team to support our product for the foreseeable future.

What was the scope of their involvement?

We brought Gorilla Logic on to be a long-term development partner. We turned over a set of existing products to them and have worked with them to expand feature-by-feature. We’ve also allowed them to refactor and structure code where necessary. They continue to provide app development services for one core product that we’ve distributed across different platforms. 

We built a team of thirteen with them, and we treat them like full-time employees. They write app code in their native languages.

What is the team composition?

Our team of thirteen Gorilla Logic team members includes three iOS developers, two Android developers, one Roku developer, one smart TV developer, three QA people, and a scrum master.

How did you come to work with Gorilla Logic?

The app developers we’d been working with were in Belarus, New York, and Nigeria. Maintaining these relationships came with significant logistical challenges, so we wanted to consolidate. I did a bunch of research and read a lot of review sites. We were hoping to find somebody locally based; nearshore is a big thing compared to a more generic offshore approach, and that was a criterion of ours.

We also had requirements around company capsize and employee hire base. We know there are a lot of really large development organizations out there, and we're not the largest client in the world, so we didn’t want to go with somebody that was so big that it didn't matter if they kept or lost us. 

We needed mobile specialty above anything. We had a cost range, but finding the right relationship was really important for us. I ended up reaching out to 5–6 different organizations. One of the early things that made Gorilla stand out was the tone that they take and the way that they approach wanting to be a partner as opposed to just completing a project and moving on. Within five minutes of us submitting a contact form, their office manager called and was very friendly and excited. A lot of the other companies we talked to weren’t as enthusiastic, so we appreciated the personality and enthusiasm that Gorilla brought to the early selection process.

How much have you invested with them?

We’ve spent somewhere in the range of $120,000–$150,000 per month.

What is the status of this engagement?

Our work together began in November 2018. We’re still working with them and looking to expand our business.

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

Over the time that we’ve worked with them, we’ve maintained a 4.9-star rating in the App Store. We’ve earned, not recruited, a somewhat permanent feature slot in the App Store’s Wellness category. Over the last two years, we’ve also grown our iOS monthly member base from around 130,000 to 200,000.

We’ve been steadily growing a lot. I can also say that we’ve maintained a crash-free rate above 98.5%. 

How did Gorilla Logic perform from they were a project management standpoint?

They’ve been pretty great. I’m super involved; we operate as if they were on-site, full-time engineers, scrum masters, and QA. We all participate in daily standups and sprint rituals. I basically just Slack them instead of walking over to their desks. 

We have a super tight integration. From a project management standpoint, it’s almost more on me. We use a Jira board, which I manage. We do have a scrum master from their end who does a lot to keep the two-week sprint cycles moving efficiently and help us to improve velocity and reliability. One of their scrum masters left, and both of the people we’ve worked with have been pretty great. Other than that, we’ve had very little turnover on their team.

What did you find most impressive about them?

Their personality and enthusiasm distinguish them from other providers. Based on the quality of developers they’ve brought to us, they are big fish in a small pond in Costa Rica. They are the place that all of the developers and talent in Costa Rica want to be and work, so they have a really large talent pool to draw from. They’re getting the cream of the crop in that location.

Additionally, their attitude of partnership as opposed to project is really what we were looking for as a smaller business with a long-term product. A lot of companies don’t see a project as much more than an investment in time to get a paycheck and potentially a good resume piece, so the client relationship doesn’t matter much to them.

Are there any areas they could improve?

I think it’s really good for remote teams to spend some time together on an annual basis. Our group at Gaia that works directly with Gorilla has been down to Costa Rica once or twice, although COVID-19 has changed things. 

Gorilla also used to have a program where they’d send their developers up to experience our office and environment once a year, and they stopped doing that prior to COVID. As a company that’s investing in being a partner, it’s nice to put a little bit of extra attention in so that you can really feel like a tight-knit team. However, other than that, we’ve really gotten what we were looking to out of this relationship. 

Any advice for potential customers?

Approach them as if you’re bringing on a partner and looking to build an integrated team that you work with day-to-day. If you’re looking for some waterfall development shop that you can hand over a huge set of requirements to, I’m not even sure they’re interested in that as a client. Go into it understanding that you want a partnership and daily involvement. Your work will be better for having a team that functions that way.

Introduce your business and what you do there.

I’m the director of quality engineering for Mersive Technologies, Inc. We build hardware and software for collaboration for meetings. Most of our customers are larger corporations or university classrooms. 

What challenge were you trying to address with Gorilla Logic?

We had a hard time staffing QA engineers, so we needed some staff augmentation. We also needed a development team. 

What was the scope of their involvement?

The QA team provides staff augmentation, specifically QA engineers, for all of our different Scrum teams. They do regression testing, testing stories for verification, and more. They use Java, Python, and C++.
The development team builds automation frameworks, and writes code to automate test cases. They also write production codes, and have developed some components in the area of analytics to go into our product.

What is the team composition?

There are five people on my QA team that I regularly interact with. On the development team, there are 3-4 people. 

How did you come to work with Gorilla Logic?

One of our executives recommended them, as he had worked with them in the past. We liked the individuals we interviewed, and entered into a short contract to test their work. We were happy with what we saw, and extended the contract.

How much have you invested with them?

We spent about $500,000.

What is the status of this engagement?

We began working together in August 2019, and it’s ongoing.

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

They are integrated into our teams, so it’s hard to separate their metrics. Both teams, automation engineers and manual testers, are top-notch. Everyone has been extremely happy with what they’ve produced.

How did Gorilla Logic perform from a project management standpoint?

The QA testers operate within our Scrum teams, so they don’t do the project management. The development team has their own Scrum Master, and they’ve done well with managing their projects. We use Jira and Confluence for project management.

What did you find most impressive about them?

They are able to integrate very well with our teams and work the same hours because they’re in the same time zone. That is the biggest advantage I have with them in contrast to other offshore vendors I’ve worked with. I consider them to be part of our team.

Are there any areas they could improve?

It isn’t their fault, but our biggest issue is getting equipment to them due to shipping restrictions. Under normal circumstances, they make frequent trips here, but COVID has put a damper on that.

Do you have any advice for potential customers?

Fully integrate them into your development process.

Introduce your business and what you do there.

I’m the director of engineering for Weedmaps. We are a listing service for online advertising marijuana brands and dispensaries, as well as a wholesale and delivery services branch of the company.

What challenge were you trying to address with Gorilla Logic?

We have worked with them to address several tech projects that we didn’t have the internal resources to handle.

What was the scope of their involvement?

The first project that we contracted the Gorilla Logic team to handle was a Ruby on Rails backend and frontend of a point of sale system that had been left by the wayside but still had a lot of customers utilizing that needed to be updated.

The system itself was used by around 5,000 dispensaries around the country for tracking sales, employees, and inventory, but the versions of Ruby and Rails it was using were about three full updates behind. They were able to upgrade the entire system without any down time in the overall function of the application.

The process was a lot more complicated than it seemed because of the amount of changes involved, as well as the need to shift to a completely new ORM that was active record.

What was the team composition?

There were three Ruby engineers, a QA guy who was absolutely phenomenal, and a TPM, manager, and an account manager. In total, our meetings would be the first five and then I communicated with the account manager a good amount outside of those.

How did you come to work with Gorilla Logic?

We went to a bunch of different rails shops and they were all quoting us fairly expensive rates for the work. I knew of Gorilla Logic from a previous relationship, so I decided to reach out to them and they came back to us at about half of what the competition was asking, so we moved forward with them from there.

What is the status of this engagement?

We first started working with them in December 2019, and once that was done we were able to bring in a few of their developers to work with us full-time on a variety of projects, and those are still ongoing.

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

I don’t have any specific metrics produced as a result of the work that they did, but our main metric of success for them is that they function at the same velocity as our in-house engineers. We have a pretty high standard, so the fact that we’ve never had to change out any of the developers provided by Gorilla Logic is really impressive.

Not only is the quality of their individual work incredibly high, but they integrate into our team very smoothly and work within our format so that we can track bugs and downtime with all of our engineers in the same way. It really has been an absolutely seamless process from end-to-end.

How did Gorilla Logic perform from a project management standpoint?

Their project manager for us as really good and played a key role in maintaining all of our internal processes. We just used JIRA to communicate with each engineer and would work with his team to give us accurate estimates of how long each element that they were developing would take.

On top of all of that, the project manager was actually able to work directly with me to determine each module that needed to be upgraded and actually write the specific requirements so that we could define when we were done and all of the steps necessary to get there along the way. I was able to completely rely on them to make sure that we were always on track toward our goals.

What did you find most impressive about them?

From my experience with other outsourced companies, the developers and other team members from Gorilla Logic have been more dependable and more a part of our team than any I have had experience with before. Not only are they really solid engineers, but they make an effort to fit in and become part of your team as much as the in-house developers, which makes them incredibly easy to work with.

Are there any areas they could improve?

The only hiccup we’ve really had with them was that in our first project, it took us a longer time than we were expecting to get Ruby developers because of the leave notice requirement that Colombia has.

 It took us 4-5 weeks to get the team fully staffed, which wasn’t even that long, but that was the one thing that I wish could have been a little different. Otherwise, everything has been definitely worthwhile throughout the whole partnership.

Do you have any advice for potential customers?

Just make them regular parts of the team rather than treating them as a contractor. If you don’t have your own in-house team, just make sure that you have a solid project manager who knows what you want and can work closely with them to make sure they can hit the ground running.

Introduce your business and what you do there.

I’m the head of technology for AST Private Company Solutions. We have a product called Astrella in the marketplace. It’s a SaaS platform for private companies to manage their ownership such as shares, and options.

What challenge were you trying to address with Gorilla Logic?

We had to build the product quickly. We wanted to outsource for the ability to ramp up quickly.

What was the scope of their involvement?

Gorilla used a Microsoft stack to build our platform, which is hosted in Microsoft Azure and deployed by a SQL server. Their team first developed the web app. Then, they built our mobile app, which talks to the web app. To make the functionalities work, their team integrated the platforms with other vendors and partners. A specific team focuses on those integrations because they’re so important.  

We made the technology and platform choices. But there were tools in support of those platforms that Gorilla recommended.

At this point, Gorilla makes up almost the entirety of our development team and manages our code. Their team uses Azure DevOps and the operational tools that come with it.

What is the team composition?

We started this project with 5 people from Gorilla and now we’re up to 21. Their team includes a product owner and a scrum master. We split the core team in two because it got too big. We recently added an integration team because our product relies on other vendors and partners.

How did you come to work with Gorilla Logic?

I found them by accident. I was told that there was a quality development operation in Costa Rica. I googled Costa Rica offshore development and Gorilla Logic came up. They offered us not only a quick ramp-up but also a process-oriented culture, which we needed. Their team had expertise in the Agile product development methodology. Only later did I find out that they weren't the agency I was initially recommended. 

What is the status of this engagement?

Our first sprint was in June 2019 and our partnership’s ongoing.

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

Most importantly, the products are of high quality. There are areas where it wasn’t as built out as I had hoped. And there are other areas where it was built our more completely than I hoped. I feel good about the products that we put out there.

Our parent company was absolutely stunned by the speed at which we delivered this product. That’s the best metric. Folks that know development understand and appreciate how much we’ve done in a short period of time. People from our parent company want Gorilla to build a mobile app, but we’re holding them off. I would be surprised if they didn’t get more work from them.

Whereas I’m a ready, fire, aim person, their team often suggests that we step back to make sure a task's completed correctly. I appreciate their ability to be aggressive when necessary but also realistic. Their team keeps an eye on quality.

How did Gorilla Logic perform from a project management standpoint?

We have efficient ceremonies that are daily standups, sprint groomings, and retrospectives. Our scrum master runs those ceremonies well and keeps an eye on the clock. We also have ad hoc meetings.

We targeted an MVP in nine months, which we didn’t hit. But we knew that was an aggressive timeline. Our internal processes delayed us in the beginning too. Their team would rather slow down a smidge to get the quality right than blast through a project.

From a process perspective, we were able to rely on them heavily. They used a process that led us to complete the project quickly as well as left us with the latitude to move in a slightly different direction if needed.

What did you find most impressive about them?

Gorilla takes a holistic view of our relationship. They also brought in experts in certain areas who allowed our team to gain knowledge. We didn’t pay for that. Their team wants us to succeed.

They feel like a part of our company. We had a release event in California, and they sent two of their team members to attend on their nickel. They were excited and we were thrilled.

When there are problems, their team is organized. They communicate the issue to me and it's solved quickly.

Are there any areas they could improve?

Honestly, nothing jumps to mind.

Introduce your business and what you do there.

I’m a director at an HR software company that automates background investigations. For example, we fulfill the needs of companies seeking to hire someone but want to do a criminal background check or a drug screening.

What challenge were you trying to address with Gorilla Logic?

We engaged Gorilla Logic to augment our staff and to help build out several teams as we’re in the process of developing a new software platform.

What was the scope of their involvement?

Essentially, Gorilla Logic’s helping us build the new core order entry and processing platform. Their team’s developing a backend system on Apache Kafka and the platform’s running on Google Cloud Platform. There are four different mobile-ready web components. They’re leveraging a modern tech stack that includes the workflow automation framework called Camunda and GraphQL.

What is the team composition?

We have two full teams working on the new platform. Those teams include 7–8 individuals including a tech lead, several senior software engineers, a couple of mid-level engineers, and QA engineers. Both teams share a scrum master.

How did you come to work with Gorilla Logic?

We looked at about four other nearshore providers. We knew that Gorilla Logic was more of a premier provider. Ultimately, we weren’t as satisfied with the other folks that we talked to based on the quality of the candidates as well as the companies’ overall reputations. We chose to spend a little more money to get higher quality than to seek deeper cost savings with a second or third-tier provider.

How much have you invested with them?

All in, we spend around $375,000 a month. We have several other Gorilla Logic teams that support our legacy platform.

What is the status of this engagement?

We started working with Gorilla Logic in September 2018 and the work’s ongoing.

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

In terms of their impact on the business, we engaged with them to add a variable staffing model to allow us to accelerate the build-out of the new platform. By having two-plus teams from Gorilla Logic, which is essentially half the size of the overall team, we’ve been able to accelerate our timelines in terms of getting our new platform to production. That’s significant. I have a lot of respect for our teams at Gorilla Logic. They’re very sharp individuals. The company can certainly find strong, top talent.

How did Gorilla Logic perform from a project management standpoint?

A handful of staff is embedded in employee-based teams and I’m in touch with them all of the time. We’re using the Atlassian stack, so Confluence and JIRA primarily. We also use a tool called Miro— an online, agile-based tool that allows users to do story mapping, card slicing, and decomposition. That has been a useful platform that they’ve presented to us.

What did you find most impressive about them?

Gorilla Logic has a different level of talent. Their team works extremely hard. They have a fantastic corporate culture. I’ve made several trips to San Jose to visit with Gorilla Logic and their facilities are top-notch, which shows that they take care of their employees and invest in them. That was important to us.

Are there any areas they could improve?

No, it really comes down to communication and I don’t feel like there’s a gap.

Do you have any advice for potential customers?

If companies don’t communicate early and often, they won’t get the same success we’ve had. Businesses tend to engage with a partner like Gorilla Logic and expect them to be productive right out of the gate. Companies have to invest time upfront to ramp up the team and help them understand the business as well as the platform. What you put into a partnership's what you're going to get out of it.

Introduce your business and what you do there.

I am a senior manager at Maxar. We are involved in various aspects of satellite production, satellite imagery collection, and intelligence gathering from satellites. My division is primarily concerned with collecting and processing remote sensing imagery from a constellation of satellites circling the earth. The project distributes the imagery to various customers around the globe.

What challenge were you trying to address with Gorilla Logic?

We initially were looking for a company to help build a new processing system for cataloging images from one of our newer satellites but ended up wanting a longterm partner.

What was the scope of their involvement?

Gorilla Logic has been our partner for four years now. They initially provided staff augmentation for us but we eventually ended up bringing on entire flex teams from their Costa Rica development center to help out with our various projects. They produced the catalog system and the UI that went with that. They did virtually all the coding for our UI.

What is the team composition?

Gorilla Logic supplied us with four developers, 2 QA people, and a scrum master. The team varied from 6–7 people for the duration of the project.

How did you come to work with Gorilla Logic?

Our work with Gorilla Logic began several years prior to my engaging with them. We liked that they were local to us. 

What is the status of this engagement?

They began supporting my team in late 2015 but started in earnest in spring 2016. It went public two years ago, but they’ve been enhancing and maintaining it ever since.

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

Gorilla Logic provided great designs for us. Our project manager worked hand-in-hand with their engineers to come up with the initial wireframes and flows of the UI. The senior guys took a good lead in helping develop a lot of the components. Gorilla Logic made the decisions for what technology stack to go with, which turned out to be a good decision. 

Things have gone very smoothly overall. Gorilla Logic has the experience and the maturity necessary for our project. They selected the right frameworks and did a good job coding for us. They were as, if not, more productive than teams we had on-site. 

How did Gorilla Logic perform from a project management standpoint?

We work in an agile approach and our teams use Rally to track our work and communicate.

What did you find most impressive about them?

The fluidity and ease of communication with Gorilla Logic were incredible. Actually working with them and going through design sessions was as easy as working with a local team or onshore team. I was also impressed with their technical capabilities, they know a lot about developing software. They’ve learned the tools of their trade quite well.

Are there any areas they could improve?

We brought on multiple teams from Gorilla Logic and have had spotty success with some of them. Several of them matured and learned the technology we needed. In one instance, we hired a team and they were a bit younger. They didn’t produce the results we were looking for and we ended up calling off that engagement. However, we continue to work with Gorilla Logic because we’ve had success with their other teams.

Do you have any advice for potential customers?

First, decide how you want to use Gorilla Logic. If you’re looking for staff augmentation, know that they are very choosy about their engineers. You will probably have success with whoever you get from a staff perspective. 

If you decide to work with their entire team, either onshore or offshore, keep a close eye on what you get with that team. Give them feedback if you’re not satisfied and Gorilla Logical will fix the problem.. I had one bad experience, but all of the other experiences I had with them were quite good.

Introduce your business and what you do there.

I’m the director of engineering at SambaSafety, a SaaS company.

What challenge were you trying to address with Gorilla Logic?

Since we were developing new applications, we wanted to expand our team and look at different options. In the past, we worked with offshore companies and had challenges with the time zones. This time, we decided to go with a nearshore partner.

What was the scope of their involvement?

Gorilla Logic augmented our development staff, assisting with web applications and backend systems. There are a lot of backend integrations and data processing involved along with frontend web apps. We have an opensource Java as well as .NET. Our team also uses some of the latest technologies like Pivotal Cloud Foundry (PCF).

We have multiple applications; some of which need continuous feature development. Since we work with a lot of states that change their formats, there’s more on that front too.

What is the team composition?

In the beginning, we engaged with 11 people. Half of them were in opensource and the other worked with Microsoft technologies. Later on, we ended up scaling them.

How did you come to work with Gorilla Logic?

We evaluated a couple of companies in Mexico. We ended up finding Gorilla Logic in Costa Rica.

How much have you invested with them?

Each month, we spend between $100,000–$200,000.

What is the status of this engagement?

Our engagement with Gorilla Logic started in June 2018.

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

We track a few metrics internally, comparing the team’s performance. We do a follow-up on their work.

How did Gorilla Logic perform from a project management standpoint?

If they’re working on a newer application, they excel. When working on legacy applications where domain knowledge is required, it takes a bit of time.

What did you find most impressive about them?

Compared to other vendors, Gorilla Logic is more proactive. They always come up with ideas, working hard to be part of the team. Their team doesn’t just take instructions and finish the job; they look for ways to add value.

Are there any areas they could improve?

We have a QA group. Their team wants to be more involved in the automation process, but if they can have more training on their side, they can be more helpful in those areas.

Do you have any advice for potential customers?

Clients need to work closely with them at the beginning. The training period is crucial. If you have an existing app, you need to be involved in all of the discussions so that they can understand.

We started in groups that involved one developer sitting with you for 4–5 hours as you work together on the same issue or features. Applying some of these in the beginning while onboarding the resources will be successful in the long run.

Introduce your business and what you do there.

I was a product manager for internal tools for the sales efficiency team at a large internet platform.

What challenge were you trying to address with Gorilla Logic?

We offer a lot of internal tools for our sales team, but they were outdated and not very user-friendly. We brought in Gorilla Logic to revamp one of the more commonly used pages within our internal CRM, with the goal of making it more intuitive and business-friendly. This was necessary in order to ensure that we’re offering the best solution and enable the sales team to have the right conversations with our customers.

What was the scope of their involvement?

We were essentially improving the user experience to make it more intuitive. Part of it was updating data models so we could recommend the right tasks for our service professionals. Another aspect was working on the look and feel. The last time that page was worked on was probably about 10 or 15 years ago. To bring a modern look and feel, their team did a lot of frontend work and connecting different data models through the backend.

The web-based application is on Java. Their team converted older technology to a much more updated system. They replace struts libraries with spring libraries. They also integrated a few CARIS models.

What is the team composition?

We had a Scrum master, technical lead, frontend developer, and two backend developers. We also had a QA that focused on automation.

How did you come to work with Gorilla Logic?

One of our senior leaders brought them in.

How much have you invested with them?

I believe we spent around $200,000.

What is the status of this engagement?

Gorilla Logic joined the project in March 2019 and concluded their work about two weeks ago.

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

The system is going live next week. Internally, the feedback has been positive. Everyone is thrilled with the updated look. They think it will be much more intuitive. It will be easier to train the agents on it as well. The training team feels that it would take much effort for users to understand how to manage the pages. Overall, it’s been a much more cohesive experience.

How did Gorilla Logic perform from a project management standpoint?

Gorilla Logic was timely with meeting their deliverable every sprint. We primarily manage everything in Jira. The Scrum master was great at chasing everything down and making sure they removed any roadblocks. In terms of the quality of work, they delivered with confidence. They made sure that they had the support to test and ensure automation going forward.

What did you find most impressive about them?

There weren’t time zone challenges that generally happen when working with offshore teams because they’re nearshore. Everyone at Gorilla Logic has excellent communication skills. Overall, their technical understanding and ability were very high. Their senior frontend developer helps our junior frontend developer grow by helping them understand the best practices. It didn’t feel like they were a separate team. Gorilla Logic is a collaborative and amazing group to work with.

Are there any areas they could improve?

Because of budgetary concerns from our side, their team had to roll out before we pushed the system live. If there are any issues found, it will be a challenge without their support.

Do you have any advice for potential customers?

After the feature goes live, make sure there is adequate support.

Introduce your business and what you do there.

I’m the head of solutions at a software company. We’re a large technology company with a software as a service (SaaS) platform.

What challenge were you trying to address with Gorilla Logic?

We had a project with a software component that required features and functionality that was not in our existing software. That meant we either had to build it internally or work with an outside partner—we decided on the latter.

What was the scope of their involvement?

Our product is a SaaS platform, through which I can send alerts to the user. The software is written in Java.

What is the team composition?

We have a fully independent scrum team. There’s a technical lead/project leader, a scrum master/product owner who works with the product owner on our side, a couple of senior developers, a couple of junior developers, a QA, and a dev ops person.

How did you come to work with Gorilla Logic?

I knew someone at Gorilla Logic, which meant they were my first call, but we then went through a pretty rigorous process. I did some online research to find five other companies. We looked at the cost and whether they would require a lot of hand-holding or if they could be quite independent. We felt confident that they could deliver high quality, on time, and within the budget.

What is the status of this engagement?

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

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

It’s still too soon to have metrics, but we plan to complete the project in six to eight weeks. It’s very much on track.

We’ve had a few bumps and surprises along the way, but everything has been minor and to be expected. Any problems are mostly coming from our side, and then we get solutions from their side.

How did Gorilla Logic perform from a project management standpoint?

They have a business project management component, where invoicing, meeting the team, and signing the contract is done with an account service manager.

Beyond that, they use Jira for their day-to-day management. We have bi-weekly phone calls and sprint reviews. The technical lead has been to our office for a week at the kick-off and will be back in a couple weeks for more work, and I went to visit them as well. He’s competent, capable, highly technical, and a pretty good communicator. The scrum master directs the team day-to-day and leads daily stand-ups. We continue conversations through emails, as needed.

What did you find most impressive about them?

The most impressive thing is my level of confidence in them. One thing we added to this particular project is a stakeholder meeting, once a month. We don’t fear them embarrassing us in that, despite the presence of our global stakeholders. We trust in both their technical abilities to explain things and their communication abilities when it comes to our international partners.

They do a great job of communicating with us in a good, timely fashion. I’m confident they’ll deliver what we need technically, but I also know I can bring them into the conversations with other people.

Are there any areas they could improve?

They’re almost an extension of our team—we treat them that way and they expect that. They do eight hours of work a day and get the job done, rather than being treated as a service team that’s just thrown in. They return a good investment for that.

Do you have any advice for potential customers?

No.