MojoTech

BACKGROUND

Please describe your company and your position there.

Chief Information Officer

OPPORTUNITY / CHALLENGE

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

We have hired them for several iterations of our nationally recognized 211 search engine.

SOLUTION

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

We reviewed several web development companies and chose them due to their diverse skill set and proximity to us. We also liked that all the work was done by Mojotech employees.

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

We started with a very open scope and Mojotech helped us to define the project as well as adding their own experience and expertise to get us to a product spec that we could not have imagined on our own.

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

We worked with the Business Development Director, the CTO, a product manager, and many developers throughout the project.

RESULTS & FEEDBACK

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

Mojo has always been able to deliver on the project level estimations for all of our engagements.

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

It is a true agile process that includes daily standups and interactions with the product owners at our company as well as the Product Manager and developers from Mojotech. Many vendors claim to be agile, but Mojo delivers on the approach.

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

The added value that they provide during product specification that always leads to a better product in the end.

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

We always manage to get better products than we envision, so there is not much to improve.

BACKGROUND

Introduce your business and what you do there.

We operate in the events and hospitality technology space, building software that helps companies plan their events, including things like register attendees, create websites for events, check-in people at events, and book hotels for events. We also allow hotels to create booking experiences for people attending events. I’m the senior VP of products. 

OPPORTUNITY / CHALLENGE

What challenge were you trying to address with MojoTech?

Our first engagement was a number of years ago, and it was one of MojoTech’s first engagements when they were getting started. We were looking to enter a new space and wanted to build a prototype for a software concept that we had for an e-commerce marketplace, and they helped us do that as an initial mini-engagement.

After that, we were looking to make a major improvement to our product, primarily with an eye on user experience (UX). We hired MojoTech to do that, and they helped us revamp and retool the product again, primarily from a UX perspective.

Since then, they’ve worked with us on a bunch of projects, including some pretty large ones. Most recently, they helped with a major project in the e-commerce space. 

SOLUTION

What was the scope of their involvement?

All of our engagements with MojoTech required similar types of interactions, skill sets, and capabilities. Usually, each product started with defining the product, gathering requirements, conducting market research, reaching out to users, and doing a lot of discovery. They don’t just start writing code or building UX or wireframes; they really like to understand the business behind the software, user personas, and objectives.

That’s usually the first phase. Depending on the complexity of the project, it could either be a more intense process or a very simple process. Then, we go into wireframing and project planning. If it’s a complex project, we break it up into phases; they agree with us on setting priorities and what’s going to get done when, phasing, and aligning with our engineering teams to make sure that all the plans are landing on time in terms of delivering UX and writing code.

A planning phase to discovery is first, planning is second, and wireframing is third. We align if this is really what we want to build and how we want to build it. The fourth phase is coming up with the actual UX, which is a combination of interactive and visual design. MojoTech does both and is very good at it, which is why we like them; many firms out there are either great at visual or interactive.

Lastly, depending on the project, we either do the bulk of the actual development, or we engage them to help with the development. In some cases, we’ve done 100% of the development, and they only deliver UX files to us; in other cases, we worked together with their development team to build the product. In rare cases, they’ve done it from A-Z: they’ve coded it, they did the QA for it, and they were the development shop for that product.

At peak capacity, I’d say there were 10 people from MojoTech working on projects. Usually, the interaction within projects is kept to three or four people on a regular basis.

How did you come to work with MojoTech?

For us, it was unique because one of their founders used to work for me. He was my chief architect at a prior firm and had incredible talent. Then, their CEO was also introduced to me through him, and we did some work together. When they founded MojoTech, they were the top of the list because I knew they could do magic, having worked directly with them before.

We gave them a small project, they really hit it out of the ballpark, and our relationship continued to grow alongside their company’s growth. We were one of their first five engagements when they had two or three people at the firm.

How much have you invested with MojoTech?

Knowing the size of their company and what percentage of them was working on our stuff, I assume we’re surely one of their larger clients for the past couple of years.

What is the status of this engagement?

The first engagement was in 2008. We’re still working with them. 

RESULTS & FEEDBACK

Could you share any evidence that would demonstrate the productivity, quality of work, or impact of the engagement?

One of the challenges in working with an outside firm to build or renovate software is going from concept to launching a successful product. The reason we keep going back to MojoTech is that they’re very execution-oriented. They’ll get stuff done on time—often ahead of time—which is unique in this space. They are very quick; get them engaged with something, and within a couple of days, they’ll bring ideas to the table and really get it up and running. They almost have a right and left brain in one firm: they’re able to come up with user-friendly designs that are also beautiful and engaging. My association with them would be getting products out the door on time as opposed to products lingering, which often happens.

How did MojoTech perform from a project management standpoint?

They’re very responsive. They’re focused on client deliverables versus having things continue without deadlines. We used a bunch of different tools for communication: everything from Slack to Basecamp to other tools that don’t come to mind. Let’s say there is something in the UX we want to explore. Rather than going to a project manager for that particular situation, we can deal directly with the designer, which truly takes out a lot of the noise and expedites matters. They are nimble enough to be able to do that.

What did you find most impressive about MojoTech?

It’s their flexibility. Whether it’s getting a feature done on a smaller project of a few weeks or a massive multiyear project, they’re able to handle both and everything in between fairly easily. We also appreciate their quickness, responsiveness, and ability to deliver on time and within budget. That’s fairly unique in this space because software development companies are part of ongoing engagements, deliverables are not as clear, and there are delays.

Are there any areas MojoTech could improve?

They’re growing very rapidly, and they will continue hopefully to do that because they’re good. But, with growth comes issues of scalability and organization, and I think they’ll do that as they grow. I don’t see gaps today, but it’s just something where they’ll continue to evolve.

What tips or recommendations could you share that might increase the likelihood of success with MojoTech?

We highly recommend them. They’re a great team. They always underpromise and over-deliver. 

BACKGROUND

Please describe your organization.

We offer a web-based application for automobile dealers which works as a CRM and internet lead manager. It's designed to help dealerships sell more cars. We've been in business for ten years.

What is your position?

I am the founder of the company.

OPPORTUNITY / CHALLENGE

What business challenge were you trying to address with MojoTech?

MojoTech resumed the work started by our original developers in Ireland for our mobile app.

SOLUTION

Please describe the scope of their involvement.

MojoTech had to create the application program interface [API] that acted as the connectivity between the mobile devices and the web application. The mobile app is not designed to work as a standalone product.

They analyzed our code and told us what some of the issues with it were. It was agreed that it didn't have to be rewritten. This was already a mature application and MojoTech was used to writing code starting from scratch. Being able to continue the work for our app was proof of their expertise and willingness to adapt.

We weren't planning on having as many engineers as we did for the project’s work. I was convinced otherwise by MojoTech and it has paid off in the end. We had up to four developers, but that number settled to two. Our quality assurance person was based in Portugal, while the rest of the developers were in Providence, Rhode Island. If we had more financial resources, we'd add more people to our team.

MojoTech was quite aggressive in trying to make the solution work and keeping us as a client. They invested a lot of time in finding the right people for us. We requested a lead programmer in August and only received them in December of 2014. Getting used to the code of a mature application takes some time. We started seeing the benefits of their work by the third quarter of 2015.

How did you come to work with MojoTech?

I had worked with the same project manager from the beginning of our software development. When he left his company and started his own, I had confidence that he could hire the right people for my needs. For a while, he did, but then the relationship became stagnant. He couldn't find the right help and had some personal issues. I started looking for a different company and eventually found MojoTech, which happened to be located four blocks from my office. We researched young companies that were using Ruby on Rails as their main language and had mobile capabilities for developing an iOS app. We interviewed a number of candidates, and among them, met with MojoTech's owners. We found them to be honorable people.

Could you provide a sense of the size of this initiative in financial terms?

The total development cost for 2015 has been $700,000. In 2016, we will be spending another $600,000.

What is the status of this engagement?

Our initial talks with them started in 2014. We started working with MojoTech at the beginning of 2015. We will be having a meeting soon in which we will plan out our requirements for the next year and a half.

RESULTS & FEEDBACK

Could you share any statistics or metrics from this engagement?

MojoTech has picked up some features from code that were already written and also wrote some elements from scratch. They're adapted to the task and it has been mindboggling what we've been able to accomplish within the last year.

We have some catch-up to do in regards to our competition. We operate in the same space as some billion dollar companies. We had a good application before MojoTech, but they were able to incorporate some feature content which works within the original minimalist philosophy. The user experience has not been affected by the changes.

We started to see a change within 2015, which was their first year of development. We knew that some of the features entered into the system, like texting, added to the impact. The first quarter of 2016 has been the best quarter we've ever had, not just in terms of new accounts created for our software, but also in bringing the attrition rate to an acceptable level. We work within a very competitive space and there are alternative systems to ours which are very feature-rich, but difficult to operate. People were interested in our solution even though we weren't technically equal to the alternatives. During 2015, customers who had cancelled our service came back to us and we came to install it at a higher rate than we'd ever installed before. This is a direct result of MojoTech's feature development and their ability to execute my visions.

How did MojoTech perform from a project management standpoint?

We conduct weekly meetings with their project manager which can sometimes run up to two hours, depending on what we're working on. He is able to write the stories on the base of which the developers actually build our solutions. This has been a tremendous advantage, not just from my point-of-view, but also from that of the support staff and tech development team. The increase in our business and the income resulted from it are directly tied to the feature development done by MojoTech.

We used Pivotal Tracker at MojoTech's suggestion, as well as Basecamp and HipChat, which we were already using. We mostly communicate through HipChat and Pivotal Tracker. Previously, we'd used Trello.

What distinguishes MojoTech from other providers?

There are a lot of programming companies in the market, each with a different process. MojoTech builds, checks, and organizes the code in an exceptional way. Their meticulousness might slow things down a little bit because it's important to build code without having the system crash. It can happen either way, but we have a better shot of getting it right the first time.

BACKGROUND

Please describe your organization.

SendGrid is a proven, cloud-based customer communication platform that drives engagement and business growth. We are a leader in email deliverability and our platform successfully delivers over 23 billion emails each month for Internet and mobile-based customers like Airbnb, Pandora, HubSpot, Spotify, Uber and FourSquare as well as more traditional enterprises like Intuit and Costco.

What is your position?

I am a front-end software engineer.

OPPORTUNITY / CHALLENGE

What business challenge were you trying to address with MojoTech?

We needed help in implementing a new design for one of our products.

SOLUTION

Please describe the scope of their involvement.

We had an in-house designer who had worked on our product's visuals using a wireframe. MojoTech built out a static site reflecting our wireframe design. We used that site as a mockup prototype in order to work on the design further.

We worked with another one of their developers in order to implement a feature on our site based on CSS wireframes that had already been built. We would have continued our work, but didn't have the budget to do so.

Throughout the project, we worked with two developers. Both were responsive in incorporating feedback into their work and talking to the right people in order to make progress within the project.

How did you come to work with MojoTech?

My manager was acquainted with their CEO. I wasn't involved in the selection process.

What is the status of this engagement?

Our relationship is temporarily on hold.

RESULTS & FEEDBACK

Could you share any statistics or metrics from this engagement?

MojoTech were very efficient and responsive while working on our CSS [cascading style sheets] implementations. They took initiative in talking to the right persons regarding information about the wireframes. They were proactive about making any necessary changes and understood our constraints regarding how the work should be implemented. They were overall flexible and made sure that the work would be of high quality and would work well with our product.

How did MojoTech perform from a project management standpoint?

We used Basecamp for project tracking. I reviewed their tasks through it, but mostly we had live conversations. Our work was done remotely.

We had twice-weekly meetings throughout our project in order to touch base. We also made a dedicated channel in Slack for their team. This was important for ensuring that whoever could answer a question was able to jump in. MojoTech wasn't simply restricted to one contact in our group. Anytime we wanted to ask them a question, we'd post on that channel, and vice versa. This lowered the barrier of communication between us.

What distinguishes MojoTech from other providers?

Some developers tend to be stuck in their ways because of ego. We didn't see that with MojoTech. They cared only about getting the project done with a high degree of quality. Whenever we had any issues, we walked through them, and they made an effort to understand our constraints, working with us to solve the problem.