Hivekind

BACKGROUND

Please describe your company and position.

I am the Commercial Director of HosPortal

Describe what your company does in a single sentence.

HosPortal provides Australia's leading medical rostering software for hospitals and health facilities.

OPPORTUNITY / CHALLENGE

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

• Assess our current operating model to provide recommendations to allow us to grow.

SOLUTION

How did you find Hivekind?

Inbound approach

Why did you select Hivekind over others?

• High ratings
• Great culture fit

How many teammates from Hivekind were assigned to this project?

2-5 Employees

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

Hivekind undertook an assessment of our software development team, team management processes and tools and business maturity. They provided advice on all our areas of software development, including areas of improvement in our code base, and development management processes to allow us to grow effectively.

RESULTS & FEEDBACK

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

We received a high quality summary of our current state, and clear recommendations for improvement in our software development approach. The recommendations reflected our culture and aims well.

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

The team, and particularly Calum as the team leader, were responsive and efficient. Meetings were effective and punchy. Recommendations were crisp. Questions that came up in live discussion were answered clearly and authoritatively.

What was your primary form of communication with Hivekind?

• Virtual Meeting
• Email or Messaging App

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

The team is technically very capable, and has an effective process to undertake research and make recommendations. Their style responded very effectively to our idiosyncratic culture and needs.

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

None identified so far! This was one of the better consulting engagements I've been associated with in many years.

BACKGROUND

Please describe your company and position.

I am the CEO of Malaysia Green Building Council

Describe what your company does in a single sentence.

A non-profit NGO consisting of a team of professional consultants, academics, technical representatives and corporates from the building & construction industry who promote sustainable buildings in Malaysia.

OPPORTUNITY / CHALLENGE

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

• Development of a web-based application to facilitate the public roll-out of new project
• Strategic planning & support to bring a MVP to market
• Product development via a collaborative, agile approach

SOLUTION

How did you find Hivekind?

Referral

Why did you select Hivekind over others?

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

How many teammates from Hivekind were assigned to this project?

6-10 Employees

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

Development of a web application to facilitate building performance evaluations including the following elements: 

• User registration & project submission interfaces where customers submit building information.
• Customer dashboard  
• Back-end project administration portal where admins perform CRUD operations on database records. 
• Development of project submission to spreadsheet workflow.

RESULTS & FEEDBACK

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

Successful development and launch of MVP on schedule and exceeding client's expectations

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

Project was effectively managed and delivered via 2-week sprints with regular status updates and additional feedback from the vendor. The vendor has undertaken the project with a collaborative approach that has yielded immediate and tangible benefits to the speed and quality of deliverables.

What was your primary form of communication with Hivekind?

• Virtual Meeting
• Email or Messaging App

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

Hivekind's stated objective of establishing "ongoing, collaborative relationships with its clients" and undertaking an "iterative, agile approach to developing products" was exemplified beyond all reasonable expectations. They acted not simply as a vendor, but as a true partner in the strategic development and delivery of this project.

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

no.

BACKGROUND

Please describe your company and your position there.

Our company publishes books and software in the legal space. We also provide legal leads for lawyers. I manage the technology department.

OPPORTUNITY / CHALLENGE

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

Our company has published willmaker, a DIY software as a desktop application for 20 years. It is a large application with more than a thousand screens. We needed to make an online version of it. While at it we also wanted to build out a reusable platform to build other types of software products.

SOLUTION

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

We were working with Hivekind at one of our sister companies for many years prior to their engagement with us. I was familiar with the systems they worked on and have had discussions with their stakeholders. Their development process was rigorous and we found that they took interest and care in improving the system. They were successful delivering non-trivial projects and constantly improving system health. My boss was also impressed with their work and introduced them to me. The project that I had needed help with required strong full-stack engineering skills and owning a project end-to-end. Hivekind team had that skillset.

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

The project we began with was to re-platform a Forms builder tool that allows building complex forms not possible in the current platform. We pivoted to build complex forms for Willmaker Online and then extract a platform from it. We had a Willmaker desktop product that we want to move to an Online Service. The Hivekind team was introduced to the SMEs on Willmaker to learn about the desktop product, the business logic and product flow. The team then captured and documented the knowledge and implemented a proof-of-concept of the new platform. The new platform was built using a React.js and PHP stack (Next.js, Typescript, PHP, GraphQL, Postgres). Willmaker Online is a suite of DIY Legal products. It consisted of 6 forms three of which are complex in different ways. The strategy was to first deliver one of the complex forms which will then prove the new platform and significantly reduce the risk of introducing a new platform and building out the remaining forms.

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

We had a technical project manager on the team, and between 4 to 7 developers were on the project at different times.

RESULTS & FEEDBACK

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

The Hivekind team built the Willmaker Online product from start to finish. The project had thousands of screens and on delivery there were no major issues. The business team was very happy with the quality at launch. The online version now enables our business team to apply different business models and pricing strategies. The conversion rate is up 70% since the launch.

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

The Hivekind team follows Agile Scrum process. The work was logged and maintained on Jira. Documentation was maintained in Confluence. Use Google Workspace for collaborating and Slack for internal communications.

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

They bring an ownership mindset to their projects and take pride in shipping. They follow a very well-defined development process and stick to it. One example is their Code Review process. Their developers write proper documentation, share their learnings with other devs and explain their changes in detail on their Merge/Pull Requests. One of our devs was embedded with the Hivekind team for a year and she loved the process and saw and wanted other teams to adopt it. They were good at assessing work, setting and meeting deadlines, and communicating priorities, roadblocks, and risks.

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

Some strong engineers we worked with left the company. Hivekind has a good hiring process that has now recruited new engineers who have brought their own strengths to the team. Overall very happy with the team.

BACKGROUND

Please describe your company and your position there.

My company - EssayJack - has since been acquired by Wizeprep. I was the cofounder & CEO of EssayJack, which was an academic writing software (now being relaunched as the Wize Writer under the new ownership). As a startup cofounder & CEO my role included everything: marketing, product, QA, finances, sales, user feedback, partnerships, client support, etc.

OPPORTUNITY / CHALLENGE

For what projects/services did your company hire Hivekind?

We hired Hivekind in January 2016 when we had a beta product that had moved beyond our MVP and was in the market getting paying users. That said, we had no in house tech team, and we turned to Hivekind at first to run a code review to identify what we had that was right/wrong to date and to make remediations. On the back of that first, short contract (approx $5k) we then sourced them as the IT provider to work with us to both remediate some of our code deficiencies, but also to build the institutional and group functionality that our technology required in order to secure B2B licenses with the schools, colleges, and universities we sought partnerships with.

Ultimately, however, the main problem that we had was that we had developed an excellent beta/proof-of-concept for our academic writing idea, but as non-technical cofounders, we needed a development team who we could work well with and that could scale up or down as our needs changed over time. Could we rely on Hivekind to be that team? They saw us from beta (2016) through an acquisition (2021), so I would have to say that, yes, they were the team for us!

SOLUTION

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

At the time that we researched a company to do a code review of what we had to date (in dev from 2014-2015 with a number of different independent contractors), we held an interview with Hivekind's founders and felt comfortable that they could offer us the kind of review in plain language that as a non-technical cofounder I would be able to action. We knew that that small contract to provide a code review would be a way to test to see if Hivekind were the development partners we would be looking for for an increased scope of work going forward.

Part of determining that they were the right fit involved inviting the key developers working on our project to a technical audit call with some technical advisors we were working with at an accelerator. The technical advisors - who had held high-level technical positions at global companies - asked our Hivekind team all sorts of complex technical questions as a way to deduce whether or not they were up to the task to delivering a fully marketable, stable, scalable product that could be venture backed.

Describe the project in detail and walk through their service package.

We worked with Hivekind for 5 years as our IT and development team. Essentially we outsourced our entire development department to Hivekind over that time frame. So the details of the project varied over that long partnership. I will describe some of the main details: in 2016 our pressing priorities were three fold:

1. develop institutional/group functionality so that educators could use our academic writing platform in institutional/classroom settings;
2. develop LTI capabilities (international standard for educational platforms to speak to each other) so that we could seamlessly integrate with international Learning Management Systems (LMS); and
3. develop a robust development protocol to streamline processes from ideation, through development, to integrated and QA testing, through to final approvals and deployment.

By 2017 our priorities shifted to moving from AWS to GCP for our deployments/hosting to take advantage not only of "startup credits," but also a more robust platform that integrated better with Google's Suite of products. As well, in 2017 we raised external capital and were able to bring in a design team to work with Hivekind to both redesign the platform, but also refactor the code base moving to React JS. We had a tight timeline and were able to relaunch a redesigned site in beta in time for the academic school year to begin.

By 2018 our priorities focused on remediation and testing. Our processes needed refinement to ensure proper Sprint methodology and structure and by early 2019 we contracted Hivekind to recruit a Product Owner to join our team as our SCRUM master and to work more closely with me on product development prioritization. We had been unable to recruit for this position successfully in house, and were very happy with the team Hivekind put together.

From 2019-2021 we reached a kind of "steady state" in our partnership with Hivekind. We had reliable sprints identifying key development priorities that ranged from improved testing, to new features, to refining existing features, to relaunching a newly designed home page and integrating 3rd party chatbots for customer support.

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

At various points throughout our five-year partnership we worked with many developers within Hivekind. Our main point of contact both at the beginning and throughout the years was the cofounder of Hivekind, a talented IT professional in his own right, who discovered a fantastic business and people sense. We trusted him to put together the right team for us.

For the majority of our time working with Hivekind our team consisted of:

• a team lead (sr developer)
• a product owner
• two or three junior/mid level developers

At one point to reach a particular deadline, other developers within the organization were pulled into providing help on the EssayJack product, and as some developers rotated in/out of our project we joked that everyone at Hivekind at one point worked on EssayJack. That was helpful for us, because our developers had other people in their workplace that they could bounce ideas off of or ask questions of.

RESULTS & FEEDBACK

Can you share any outcomes from the project that demonstrate progress or success?

Throughout our time with Hivekind, the EssayJack platform: grew to support over 30,000 users (from zero to 30,000), secured external financing, won global awards, and was acquired by a larger EdTech company, Wizeprep. Throughout the acquisition process, the EssayJack platform had to go through technical due diligence, and Hivekind had to be available to provide information on technical architecture, etc. Probably the most obvious indication of their successful work was the fact that the technical due diligence as part of the acquisition process sailed through without a hitch.

How effective was the workflow between your team and theirs?

Once we hit our groove with a well oiled SCRUM methodology, our time was very well spent. We worked on 2 week sprints, with sprint planning, retros, and demos, and once we onboarded the Product Owner within Hivekind, he was able to run the daily standups, freeing me from that daily obligation with the dev team so that I could focus on other aspects of the business. The Product Owner and I then organized our own time to work through dev priorities that he then organized for the dev team as a whole. It was a seamless way of working.

Mostly we worked remotely - google meet and slack - but when I was in the same city as the majority of the team, I would make an effort to be there in person, especially for our sprint retro and demo meetings, and even our planning meetings, where I could add value. Also, importantly, with Hivekind we set up protocols for product alerts or other problems so that we could be compliant with some of the SLAs we developed with institutional partners. So if there was a technical hiccup, Hivekind would be alerted, and whoever was "on call" would be able to respond to the hiccup. We paid a small monthly premium in order to have this service, which made us compliant with the expectations of our clients, and helped me not have panicked midnight calls if something went wrong.

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

Having a managed service provider in Hivekind freed up my time from having to build up an internal development team. The recruitment and testing of IT professionals was outsourced to Hivekind who could do it much better than I ever could. I then could focus on all other aspects of the business with my time, feeling confident in the team Hivekind had built for us.

So then my work with the Hivekind developers was the most effective: focused on product development, refinement, etc. More than that, though, we were lucky that we had a very good working relationship. The Hivekind team itself worked very well together, and they all worked very well with me. Granted, we paid for that level of service, but if I had had to have an in-house technical team of 5 people there is no way that I could have calibrated things correctly, and so much time, energy, and money would have been wasted on trying to ramp up a tech team for a startup that was still very much in its own infancy.

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

Honestly, had EssayJack not been acquired by Wizeprep we might still be working with Hivekind to this day. With the acquisition, Wizeprep already has a robust IT team and department and I no longer have to function as the de-facto CTO. Wizeprep has a very talented CTO and we no longer need to count on Hivekind to fulfill all those functions for us. Hivekind launched right around the same time that EssayJack launched, and I feel that we both grew our businesses together, and I'm happy with how we worked together.

BACKGROUND

Please describe your company and position.

I am the Executive Director Engineering of Martindale - Avvo

Describe what your company does in a single sentence.

B2C web properties for consumers to evaluate need, then find, hire, and rate attorneys.

OPPORTUNITY / CHALLENGE

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

• Rewrite complex ad delivery platform for improved performance and functionality
• Massive tech upgrade (~30 applications Ruby upgrade)
• Various well defined projects

SOLUTION

How did you find Hivekind?

Inheritedfrom parent company when we were aquired

Why did you select Hivekind over others?

• Great culture fit
• Good value for cost
• Referred to me

How many teammates from Hivekind were assigned to this project?

6-10 Employees

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

Rebuilt a complex ad delivery engine to maximize performance. Engine includes support for multiple geographic targeting (Sub county, county, state) and areos of legal practice; markets split into shared and exclusive. Coordination with weighted random selection based on ad spend and delivered value / impressions. Many ad templates and multiple ad types. New ad engine was delivered,very fast (10's of ms), functional, extendable, maintainable, and testable

RESULTS & FEEDBACK

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

Timely delivery, collaboration

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

Great communications, very organized, very flexible and collaborative

What was your primary form of communication with Hivekind?

• In-Person Meeting
• Virtual Meeting
• Email or Messaging App

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

Ability to provide full team including TPM and developers. They have very good, experienced developers.

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

More flexibility to support team augmentation models as well