Reaktiv

Introduce your business and what you do there.

I’m the associate director of an entrepreneurship center for a university.

What challenge were you trying to address with Reaktiv?

We needed to build a standalone website to serve as an entrepreneurship guide for students and alumni.

What was the scope of their involvement?

Reaktiv developed a WordPress website. The website had a large asset collection, and their team had to merge two external websites into one. They helped combine and import the content as well as improved the filter and search functionalities.

What is the team composition?

I primarily worked with three people from Reaktiv, including Tina (Project Manager).

How did you come to work with Reaktiv?

We found Reaktiv through a referral. That’s effectively why I decided to work with them because they were familiar with our university and systems.

How much have you invested with them?

We’ve spent less than $10,000 on their services.

What is the status of this engagement?

We started the project in February 2021. This project will close in March but we’re starting another project with them.

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

As far as success, the website met the specifications and scope as outlined initially. We’re happy with the end product.

How did Reaktiv perform from a project management standpoint?

Their team is attentive. We didn’t have formal deadlines for this particular project, but Reaktiv was responsive throughout the development and delivery.

What did you find most impressive about them?

One of their most impressive characteristics is their responsiveness.

Are there any areas they could improve?

No, I don’t have any feedback on how Reaktiv could improve.

Do you have any advice for potential customers?

A detailed set of specifications and scope will help optimize the engagement.

Introduce your business and what you do there.

I’m the content production manager for a podcast and content creation company.

What challenge were you trying to address with Reaktiv?

They developed a WordPress website for us.

What was the scope of their involvement?

They did everything from start to finish, including design and development. Now they continue to provide ongoing support. So far, they’ve added new features, installed plug-ins for image optimization, and created a new page where users can subscribe to receive perks, bonuses, and exclusive content.

On top of that, they’ve optimized the platform and improved the speed of the site. They’ve even worked on our Google Analytics account and have resolved any issues that Google has flagged.

What is the team composition?

We’ve worked with four people, including Josh (CEO) and our project manager.

How did you come to work with Reaktiv?

They were already working with the company when I joined.

How much have you invested with them?

We’ve spent $20,000 so far.

What is the status of this engagement?

We began working together around May 2018 and our partnership is ongoing.

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

They’re reliable and responsive. They fix issues immediately.

How did Reaktiv perform from a project management standpoint?

They’re a very friendly team, so it’s really easy to work with them. I like that I work with our project manager directly, who then assigns tasks to individual developers. It really simplifies the process for me. We use Asana to assign tasks and monitor their progress.

What did you find most impressive about them?

They have a lot of experience with WordPress, which helps them understand our needs. They’re very competent.

Are there any areas they could improve?

They could be more proactive with suggestions.

Do you have any advice for potential customers?

Make sure you understand their core competencies, and therefore, what to expect from them.

Introduce your business and what you do there.

I manage the engineering team for a computer software company that’s responsible for the company’s buyer experience.

What challenge were you trying to address with Reaktiv?

We use several different CMS tools to manage our websites but use WordPress for our blogs, which is a departure from our other systems. Our development team didn’t have the skill set necessary to manage our blogs as we received more requests for features.

What was the scope of their involvement?

Our relationship has evolved over the years. Initially, we had a few tasks for Reaktiv. Their team focused on bugs and specific features, specifically a sign-up form for an email newsletter. They installed the newsletter sign-up logic. As we enjoyed working with them, we transitioned into a retainer model of 80 hours a month.

We completely redesigned the blog, and Reaktiv handled all of the development. Their team worked with our design team and then they built out the look, feel, and functionality of the blog. We actually have more than one blog, and Reaktiv helped us create a system to make it easier for us to spin up new blogs using templates.

Basically, Reaktiv handles everything related to our blogs. Their team provides us with the WordPress expertise to handle them. They manage the backend software that runs our blogs.

What is the team composition?

I personally work with Josh (President) but there are other people in our company who work more closely with other Reaktiv team members. They provide us with a project manager who handles all of the tickets and the intakes.

How did you come to work with Reaktiv?

I asked a developer on our team if they knew any WordPress development firms. They recommended Reaktiv and then I gave them a call.

How much have you invested with them?

We currently spend $15,000 per month on their services but used to spend less.

What is the status of this engagement?

We’ve been with Reaktiv since June 2017.

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

Reaktiv takes accountability and responsibility for their work. Their team has all the power to build and deploy from scratch, and they haven’t let us down. We trust them. Their team is conscientious about their work, so they do an amazing job. Any bugs that we release, Reaktiv fixes them very quickly. They’re a great, long-term partner.

How did Reaktiv perform from a project management standpoint?

They’re a professional and friendly team. Their project manager works with our project manager. They’re proactive and follow up on tasks. If necessary, they’ll bring me into a project, and I have access to their system. Their team’s communicative and straightforward.

What did you find most impressive about them?

They’re definitely deep experts in their field. Reaktiv’s deeply knowledgeable about WordPress, setting them apart from their competition. Although they’re not just a WordPress team, they’re great at it. Their personalities set them apart too. They’re really nice people, and it’s easy to communicate with them, which is part of the reason we stay with them.

Are there any areas they could improve?

No, I don’t have much critical feedback for them.

Do you have any advice for potential customers?

Have your work ready because Reaktiv will be ready to work. It’s important to have your own designs because Reaktiv focuses on development. It’ll be helpful if you’re comfortable giving them the keys too. Let them have the power to work.

Please describe your company and your position there.

I am an Associate Director of Technology at Harvard Business School Digital Initiative. The Digital Initiative brings together perspectives across disciplines to help people understand how technology is transforming organizations and the greater world.

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

We hired Reaktiv to build a prototype of a student blogging classroom tool https://digital.hbs.edu/platform/. The idea proved to be successful and now is a big part of our content strategy and drives substantial traffic to the site. Currently, Reaktiv develops new features and maintains all parts of the site. We've seen success metrics directly linked to the great work Reaktiv does.

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

We've gathered a list of potential web developers by reaching out to teams around Harvard. Reaktiv proved to be the most aligned with the product vision, had the right expertise in WordPress development, and was an excellent fit for our smaller team. The team at Reaktiv is very well organized, uses best practices, and always helpful.

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

The Digital Initiative team established goals for the project: create a more flexible content model, present curated perspectives in a more findable way, grow a diverse community. We engaged Reaktiv and a designer to rebuild our core content model. We worked in sprints and iterated through designs as well as technical specs.

Reaktiv was excellent at establishing clear communication channels. Their project manager did a magnificent job of pulling everyone together to work as one team and, most importantly, have fun. Once we got to more technical details of the build, Reaktiv developers laid out all available options, including a solution they built for Microsoft XBOX that could work for us.

Our site runs on WordPress, and Reaktiv knows WordPress in and out. We agreed on shadow taxonomy implementation on one key piece of functionality, which worked well to fuel what we now call "Collections." And it is the homepage of our site.

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

We worked with two excellent full-stack developers: Mary Cadwell and Jay Hoffman. And a super organized and friendly project manager: Tina Berens.

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

The Digital Initiative can now take on meaningful projects and innovate because of the flexibility our site provides. We're building out different collections, currently working on a project that explores tech and inequality, and we were able to put together a Just Digital Future collection.

That beautifully showcases content, engagement opportunities for our community and features people who contribute. We're seeing more newsletter sign-ups and people exploring more content.

We've previously worked on a project that merged two WordPress instances. There were many technical details to think through, and Reaktiv delivered the site that now reaches over 2 million users annually.

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

We use Slack for stand-ups, immediate communications, and some updates. There are weekly sync meetings that Tina schedules and leads. We use Asana to keep track of all tasks that Reaktiv keeps clean and organized.

Anything that we ever need can be put in Slack, and we get a resolution or response in a matter of minutes. Or can be created as a a task in Asana. We keep a backlog of user stories in Trello that Reaktiv helps us prioritize.

We execute an SOW before every project that describes the timelines and scope of work. Reaktiv has been great at communicating ahead of time changes or discoveries that can alter the project's scope, timeline or budget.

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

The amount of immediate support from the team is impressive. I can fully trust that in case of any emergency, bugs, or site issues. Reaktiv will be able to immediately start resolving and get to the bottom of the problem.

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

We were always able to talk to Reaktiv about anything that may not work as well and resolve it. At the end of projects, we schedule retrospectives that help identify issues early and fix them.

Introduce your business and what you do there.

I’m the director of web solutions and user experience at Cornell University.

What challenge were you trying to address with Reaktiv?

We hired a design agency to redesign both the alumni and giving websites for the university. We worked on research and strategy with them then started talking about implementation.  Our team decided to use WordPress but then we needed to find a technical partner to help with this. That’s where Reaktiv comes into play.

What was the scope of their involvement?

At the very beginning of our engagement, they were able to code the templates and scenes for the website we were redesigning. Based on the developers’ recommendations from the design agency, Reaktiv went ahead and started producing and building in WordPress.

They also worked on integration. We have a third-party system that we use for events. The Reaktiv team did integration with this system that’d pull events into WordPress and display them through a plugin. They also migrated content. We had about 250 pages of content that were hosted with another third-party system we use.

Reaktiv worked on plugging into their API and pulling the content page-per-page into the website. By the time we started doing QA on the website before launch, the scenes and templates were ready and the content had been pulled. We just had to do some finishing touches and testing and we were ready to launch pretty fast.

When the design partner left the scene, we kept Reaktiv on a retainer. They help with maintenance and patches. WordPress websites require a lot of maintenance to be safe and efficient. Reaktiv also does new features and improvements. When we launched the two websites, the sites were fully functional but they were kind of an experiment. We wanted to see what worked with our audiences, what was needed, what was missing, and what could be done differently.

For the past few years, we’ve been working with Reaktiv on trying new things, implementing new features, testing, etc. We just finished a major feature on our alumni website that we’d been working on for a year with them.

What is the team composition?

We work with Nick (Senior Developer), Jay (Lead Developer), Chris (Project Manager), and Tina (Project Manager).

How did you come to work with Reaktiv?

The design agency we were working with recommended Reaktiv. We worked with Reaktiv through the design agency. We reviewed their credentials and approved them as technical partners.

How much have you invested with them?

We invest $20,000–$25,000 a year for retainer services.

What is the status of this engagement?

Our ongoing engagement started in May 2017.

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

Reaktiv works with big, well-known accounts. We’re a small account and feel very lucky to be working with them. We have a great relationship and are thankful for them. They really bring their expertise to the table. I love the collaboration with them. The work is much higher quality, enjoyable, and rewarding to have this kind of relationship with a technical partner.

On the alumni website, we publish news and all sorts of things. They’re like blog posts. We decided to come up with another form of content that would be more bite-size and easy to consume. We labeled it the “snack bar”. People can come and consume a couple of snacks. That’s a feature we’ve been working on for about one and a half years. They’ve been a great partner that helps us think through it.

They don’t simply execute what we bring to them. We enter into conversation and collaboration. Even though we hired them for web development services, they also have some design knowledge. The web developer assigned to us is really competent and is also certified in web accessibility.

This means when there are any doubts about certain contrasts, interactions, or things that could be done better, I know that I can have a conversation with the developer and that he has this expertise. That’s an added value for us instead of trying to contract with an accessibility expert.

How did Reaktiv perform from a project management standpoint?

Project management is going well and is very helpful. Reaktiv really takes care of everything in terms of breaking down tasks, establishing a deadline, managing hours, helping us with billing and invoicing, and consistently being on top of things. We get email notifications when something happens on Asana.

We really try to keep everything in Asana so that we don’t fragment the conversation. We keep everything centralized there. There’s an element of communication on GitHub sometimes when we need to discuss some things specifically about the code.

What did you find most impressive about them?

The number one thing for me is their level of expertise. They’re all seasoned WordPress professionals. Nick was a core contributor to the WordPress release which is a big deal. He’s of that caliber. He’s able to contribute to the core. They’re super professional and know WordPress inside out.

I simply want to be working with the best, and I’m lucky to be working with Reaktiv. I don’t want to work with anyone else. I have confidence and trust in them. They’re wonderful and really embedded—and respected—in the industry.

Are there any areas they could improve?

No, I can’t think of anything.

Do you have any advice for potential customers?

You can drive a Toyota Corolla or you can drive a Ferrari. You don’t drive those cars the same way. If you’re going with the Ferrari, which would be Reaktiv in this example, you have to be ready to operate at their level and be considerate of their time. Don’t waste the time of highly skilled professionals with silly stuff.

Be very clear about what your requirements are, how you’re going to be testing, and what kind of workflow you’re interested in. Reaktiv is really professional and not going to charge you for stuff that they don’t do; they’re super honest.

They’re also not cheap. They charge what they should be charging for their time. Make sure you have a strong game when you go and work with them because you’re going to be faced with people who are super professional and super good at what they’re doing.