JetThoughts

Please describe your company and your position there.

I’m the head (EVP) of Product Management at Corsis LLC, a technology advisory services firm. Our services include consultant-led and self-administered evaluations of companies and their adherence to industry best practices. We provide support for both buy and sell-side due diligence, compliance, and vendor management.

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

Corsis built a self-assessment platform to complement its existing proprietary platform. The original contract-based architect and developer had moved on to other projects, and the more junior resource that replaced him was in over his head.

The product was functional but was not being evolved utilizing development best practices, and technical debt was growing with each release. We determined that we needed a more experienced full-stack resource.

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

After a needs assessment, Paul was presented to us as a candidate by Toptal. We've had great experience obtaining resources through them as they are generally very thorough in their screening process. They also offer a 'refundable' first week, which provides an opportunity to work directly with the developer(s)at little to no risk.

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

The application is written in Ruby on Rails, uses Angular and MySQL for database. AWS provides our production hosting environment as well as pre-production and DevOps (deployment) environments.

The project had a legacy code base with a lot of redundancy, complex logic, dependencies, and very little documentation. There were few if any tests that could provide pre-emptive indications when subsequent development might cause regressions.

Complex scripts reduced developers’ effectiveness. “Bus factors” in the delivering and maintenance processes increased the time necessary to fix problems.

Some libraries that were being utilized required excessive support, reducing time available for new feature development The scope of work involved taking over responsibility for ongoing architecture and development.

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

One senior-level architect/full-stack developer is the sole engineering resource on this application.

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

We're very pleased with the results that we've seen. Areas that we've realized specific improvements include:

• Less time iterating from requirements documentation to initial development
• Fewer bugs and regressions found when testing new features (this is especially important for us because we have very limited resources available to perform testing)
• Fewer bugs found in production. Most prior bugs were regressions, often missed during pre-production feature testing. Comprehensive code coverage means fewer regressions can make it to production.
• More visibility into the codebase
• Improved deployment times
• Improved application performance; Paul did a lot of cleanup, for example request processing time for common functions was reduced from avg. 2-5 seconds to 0.5 seconds; memory usage dropped from 3GB to 1GB
• The refactoring of much of the code to follow industry best practices will allow us to add more junior developers (at the appropriate time) than we otherwise would have to

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

We primarily utilize Jira for project management, as well as Slack for real-time collaboration. We also conduct daily morning standups. In addition, and of his own accord, Paul provides a daily summary via Slack describing what he has worked on and will be working on, as well as any blockers.

Paul is working +7 hours from our local time, but has done a good job of making himself available when needed during our normal business hours, and has implemented improvements to our pre-production deployment processes to reduce dependency on our DevOps resources.

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

Paul brings a wealth of architecture and development experience to our project. He is a strong believer in doing things the right way - which may not always be the fastest way in the short run, but which ultimately saves time and money through less technical debt and improved code scalability.

Paul does not simply complete tasks. He seeks to understand the purpose behind the activity that we may task him with and actively engages in appropriate discussion to ensure that our approach is sound and that all considerations are adequately vetted.

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

Paul has very strong opinions and could benefit from a bit more diplomacy in his communication style, in particular when introducing or advocating improvements that break the 'status-quo'.

To be clear, change, including change for the better, will often meet resistance which usually needs to be navigated delicately. But the very fact that we often find ourselves having these sometimes difficult conversations is because Paul is passionate about what he does, and truly has his client's best interests in mind.

Please describe your company and your position there.

I'm the Director Center of Innovative Educational Technologies at Moscow Institute of Physics and Technology (MIPT). We are developing software for supporting the teaching and learning process in MIPT. Help all members of the institute from students to teachers improve their collaborations.

For what projects/services did your company hire JetThoughts?

Quickly scale up teams. We hired JetThoughts to augment our current engineering staff for the frontend and backend.

What were your goals for this project?

To achieve stable and fast feature development, quality control, and technical improvements.

How did you select this vendor?

I had already worked with JetThoughts for several years, and the connection had already been made. We needed to scale up, and the suggestion was to involve Paul and his team in that part.

Describe the project and the services they provided in detail.

JetThoughts team worked on the development of the backend part of the platform. So they covered part of development, testing, and support cycle, along with an in-house IT team. Work was carried out to support the existing functionality, as well as to develop new features that allow the company to attract more customers and increase its sales.

What was the team composition?

Paul augmented my team with remote developers. Team size has varied from 2-5 developers. It consists of Frontend and Backend software engineers.

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

We onboarded several guys who helped us with feature development. Without JetThoughts staff, one or the other of these key initiatives would not be complete. Our ability to deliver more with JetThoughts increases client satisfaction and increases our competitiveness in the marketplace.

How was project management arranged and how effective was it?

Since we have been in a staff augmentation model and the resources being near-shore, management of the team has the same as the rest of our in-house resources.

What did you find most impressive about this company?

I value most the selection of the specialists so that we didn't waste time trying to figure out the proper candidate among the list of names. Each person suggested was really the person professionally suitable for us. Last but not least, I think it’s the ability to receive feedback and adapt according to it. JetThoughts' flexibility which makes them stand out.

Are there any areas for improvement?

Reduce the cycle of the hiring new developers

Please describe your company and your position there.

Mobile Coach is a chatbot authoring platform for the enterprise. The Mobile Coach Platform is designed for clients to create programmatic chatbots and deploy them on a variety of common messaging channels. My name is Vincent Han and I'm the founder.

For what projects/services did your company hire JetThoughts?

We reached out to JetThoughts to support and build new features for a group of internal products related to the chatbot platform and scale R&D Team. Paul and his team have strengthened our team with their developers. We were working with them in the “Extended team” model which means that we hired 4 experts from JetThoughts to support us in web app development.

What were your goals for this project?

We needed a large-scale platform to be built. It is a collaboration project with a variety of functions. We prioritized seamless integration with our team and high-quality code delivery.

How did you select this vendor?

At that time, we worked with reliable and skilled people at Mobile Coach and we wanted to scale our team. JetThoughts, who are open-source Ruby contributors, helped us with the tech stack choice and architecture.

Describe the project and the services they provided in detail.

It’s enterprise-level authoring platform which allows users to design, deploy and manage complex programmatic chatbots. JetThoughts provided valuable developers as part Mobile Coach's development team.

What was the team composition?

We had 4 people from JetThoughts working on our project full-time and a project advisor who helped manage the team and development processes. Importantly, the composition of the team has been flexible throughout the entirety of cooperation and varied depending on our needs.

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

The quality of the development process plus the quality and commitment of the JetThoughts developers were instrumental in helping launch Mobile Coach and have its technology please our demanding, enterprise clientele.

How was project management arranged and how effective was it?

We started the project with a kick-off meeting where we set the standard for collaboration. Kanban board, regular updates, agile workflow, etc. kept the whole process crystal clear. These tools helped us monitor dev quality, budget and maximize the value JetThoughts delivers. Overall, we’ve enjoyed the communication with JetThoughts. They provide us with a high level of transparency.

What did you find most impressive about this company?

JetThoughts principals are very entrepreneurial and they really understand the process of scaling and growing a business. Their commitment to a highly technical skill set with their team members has been key for us. JetThoughts is more than a contractor—they’re a trustworthy partner with impressive knowledge and skills. Currently, I'm still working with them and giving my ideas to translate into concrete actions.

Are there any areas for improvement?

Right now, I think we’re in a really good space. We’re on schedule, which is rare. They’ve really been able to take everything I’ve thrown at them, which has been a lot.

Please describe your company and your position there.

My name is Bruno Wozniak, and I'm the Director Of Engineering at PubNative. We build ad solutions to help publishers maximize revenue across all the ad formats connecting them with advertisers. PubNative is an international enterprise of over 50 people in 2 global offices, serving clients in more than 120 countries.

For what projects/services did your company hire JetThoughts?

We contracted with JetThoughts to support and build new features for a group of internal products related to analytics and operational account management. We required Ruby on Rails vendor who provides managed services to help us scale the development based on user demands maintaining these products and expanding them.

What were your goals for this project?

There were a lot of changes to be tackled, and we needed to add tons of new features the users were asking for. We required a partner delivering a clean and well-tested code, as we wanted it to be ready for a quick scale and constant changes.

How did you select this vendor?

We work with highly devoted and enthusiastic people here, at PubNative, and expect the same from our external contractors. One of the decisive factors is the previous success JetThoughts team demonstrated and their in-depth knowledge of the Ruby on Rails technology under the hood.

At that time, we were looking for a team that could step in and get the job done right away, so their knowledge as open-source contributors and processes they built came in handy for that matter.

Describe the project and the services they provided in detail.

There were two projects JetThoughts was working on. The goal of the 1st project — provide the UI to manage the accounts and Ad Campaigns of our users. The 2nd one provides an interactive analytical tool with statistics and reports for our partners to check the performance of their ad campaigns.

Different teams had previously worked on the projects, and this fact brought some contradictory outcomes — various approaches made it difficult to understand, and we wanted to get our products rebuilt and refactored to become consistent and develop some cool features after.

When it comes to the technical stack, we used Ruby on Rails framework, and Angular / React for a frontend part. For infrastructure, we chose Kubernetes deployed to AWS.

What was the team composition?

There were 3 full-time developers and a project advisor who runs retrospectives every week and works with the managing directors here. JetThoughts team is pretty flexible, and throughout our engagement, we had plenty of opportunities to work with other developers as well.

We also had the technical advisors from top-level management involved. They mainly dealt with team supervision and architectural decisions.

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

JetThoughts team helped us to significantly reduce costs of application maintenance by implementing best practices and making our development pipeline stable. They’ve set up the process to work in a remote and async environment between the 2 teams, which continues to produce stable results.

The streamlined project onboarding takes less for new people, reduced risks related to the bus factor, and the whole working process around new features takes way less time for new people and goes smoother. Also, they have delivered a new sub-project, which reduces our expenses we have been spending on similar services.

How was project management arranged and how effective was it?

Guys cleaned up our code, brought some great routines, which allowed us to get our workflows more organized, and enhanced our app. We were flexible to manage every part of the development with their simple framework, utilizing it saved a lot of time. Kanban board, regular updates, agile workflow, etc. kept the whole process crystal clear.

They have also handled product development, QA testing, staging, and live production. We spoke directly, without proxies preventing any problems and miscommunication.

What did you find most impressive about this company?

Usually, in my experience, contractors are either highly talented but lacking in communication skills or vice versa. Guys from JetThoughts got the best of both worlds. They implemented easy ways to manage the flow of a distributed team and support high-quality code and development overall.

Their team was also detailed and precise, helping us to find problems before they appear. We knew exactly what was happening and where we were going the whole time.

Are there any areas for improvement?

I'd say the only thing was, they didn't have enough Data Engineers and DevOps people in their team, which was sometimes necessary. I wish I could submit something else to this field, but any issues we experienced were always worked out.

Please describe your company and your position there.

I'm the CEO/Co-founder of an award-winning, real estate application that allows real-time communication between real estate agents while maintaining comprehensive records of all conversations, showing requests, and transaction interactions.

For what projects/services did your company hire JetThoughts?

We hired JetThoughts to continue development of our application, which was originally developed by another consulting group. They used the foundation built by the first consultant, and continued to build new features, including our hybrid mobile application. The aim was to reuse as much as possible from the previous solutions, and accelerate our growth into the market.

What were your goals for this project?

We were looking for an external team to build our team and with expertise in building our hybrid mobile application from scratch. Our goal was to find a team that could manage and support the project with scale in mind.

How did you select this vendor?

As the company scaled, we began searching for a high-quality provider that could meet our growth needs, appreciate our vision, and bring our goals to life. We researched the top software development firms and discovered JetThoughts. After researching their background, we asked for their references and received stellar reports about their abilities.

Describe the project and the services they provided in detail.

JetThought was effectively our partner - building our product and fulfilling the R&D team for the duration of our engagement. We ran our full-cycle product development process with them, from planning all the way through to writing code. This included prioritization, scoping, and executing the code at the end of that process. We continued this process for each release, by cycling through it, delivering new production version in an agile method. This process was repeated for new features for our hybrid mobile application. They played a significant role in our business processes.

What was the team composition?

Over the years as we worked with them, the team directly contacted and collaborated with the Agent Inbox team to build a solution that suits the business needs. We engaged five members of the JetThoughts team full-time, as needed, they were adding people and scaling the team.

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

They are very accurate with their projections and estimates, even though we’ve always iterated on the idea due to feedback and the constantly changing nature of a startup. With their help, we were able to quickly scale up into our market and land new clients. During the entire business, they helped us scale to over 10% of the North American market, including over 110,000 real estate agents, and obtain enterprise clients like MLS's and Brokerages. They also helped us raise millions of dollars in funding over multiple rounds for the project.

How was project management arranged and how effective was it?

The team cleaned up our code, organized our workflows, enhanced our app, etc. They also handled product development, QA testing, staging, and live production. It was easy and satisfying to work with them.

What did you find most impressive about this company?

JetThoughts is definitely a good partner. We do not see them as a contractor or outsourcing. We wouldn't be where we were without the effort they put into our business. The other thing is that they put a lot of importance on understanding our business on a granular level and they were deeply embedded in our culture and our successes.

Are there any areas for improvement?

No. Note that they are a remote team, so your process must involve and accommodate this type of work. JetThoughts has a lot of experience training teams to do this, though, so you are in good hands.

Please describe your company and your position there.

I am the CEO at Shaparency, a digital board and governance platform.

For what projects/services did your company hire JetThoughts?

We wanted high quality software engineers to join our team and build our product.

What were your goals for this project?

Build our platform from scratch and ongoing.

How did you select JetThoughts?

Paul, is very knowledgeable and helpful in terms of best practice. The team are extremely proficient and hard working.

Describe the project in detail.

We are an engineering team, we run sprints, we plan, we develop.

What was the team composition?

We have two fullstack engineers and growing.

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

The team members and Pauls additional support is exceptional. i would always recommend them.

How effective was the workflow between your team and theirs?

great, we communicate on slack, have sprint calls and work like a normal team.

What did you find most impressive about this company?

The high quality of work and work ethic.

Are there any areas for improvement?

no