Software Mansion

BACKGROUND

Please describe your company and your position there.

Umbrella is a marketplace of skilled community workers that help homeowners 60+ take care of their homes. I am a software engineer at Umbrella responsible for web, mobile, and internal tooling.

OPPORTUNITY / CHALLENGE

For what projects/services did your company hire Software Mansion?

Software Mansion assisted us across all of our initiatives from web to mobile development to working closely with us on internal tooling. They were effectively a part of the team joining weekly stand-ups and collaborating with us closely on engineering.

What were your goals for this project?

We had a varied schedule of engineering work and wanted the flexibility of varied hours with the consistency and quality of a full-time in house engineer.

SOLUTION

How did you select this vendor?

We came across Software Mansion by way of referral, and found them the best option among the other vendors we were considering.

Describe the project and the services they provided in detail.

Software Mansion worked with us week to week dissecting product requirement docs, producing engineering specs, and developing software across all of our platforms. Our tech stack included React, React Native, Django, and PostgreSQL.

What was the team composition?

The team consisted of 5 - 6 people: a product manager, a designer, an in house full-time engineer, 1 - 2 engineers and a project manager from Software Mansion.

RESULTS & FEEDBACK

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

The project was critical in moving our business metrics as we worked to improve our customer experience. Over the course of our work with them we increased our customer engagement rates by 30%, decreased issue rates by 50%, and increased retention by 15%.

How was project management arranged and how effective was it?

We used Trello for managing our week to week and communicating specs. For everyday communication we used Slack and email as well as Google Hangouts for video calls.

What did you find most impressive about this company?

They worked very closely with us to understand requirements, iterate on the product, and build robust processes to improve productivity. Their focus was on our metrics for success rather than strictly on deliverables.

Are there any areas for improvement?

Flexibility of engineering work can be difficult to address. There are tradeoffs between rigid and highly flexible schedules, such as ramp up time, costs, and quality of work. To strike a good balance between the two often requires a thorough assessment.

BACKGROUND

Please describe your company and your position there.

I'm the CEO of the company and oversee the development of the product at a high level.

OPPORTUNITY / CHALLENGE

For what projects/services did your company hire Software Mansion?

Software Mansion has helped with a number of aspects of our software. Crucially, many of the libraries we include in our development clients were developed primarily by Software Mansion (our camera view for example). Parts of our build service were also built by Software Mansion.

What were your goals for this project?

Our business is that we provide a set of tools and services that help people build application software across Android, iOS, and the web. We have had Software Mansion help with almost the entirety of that effort. Our goals are to become the best and most popular way to build application software in the world; we aren't there yet, or even close, but we have a start.

SOLUTION

How did you select this vendor?

Our CTO, James, knew Krzysz from working together at Facebook. We worked with him on something small and then engaged others at the firm to do more.

Describe the project and the services they provided in detail.

We have had people at Software Mansion help with: - Building libraries for our development clients. These include react-native compatible libraries for camera, video, OpenGL graphics, notifications, location, background location, and more. - Building a robust service for building Android and iOS applications in the cloud, including a reliable queue, reliable reporting of errors, and autoscaling. - The React Navigation library which is a very popular library that works across native and soon the web.

What was the team composition?

The Swm team that works with us has changed over time. It has usually consisted of 2-8 developers working on the projects above and usually one project manager, along with the leaders of Swm as business contacts.

RESULTS & FEEDBACK

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

We have grown to trust Software Mansion to the point where we have them build significant parts of our core technology alongside our own team. Our software products wouldn't be as far along today if we didn't have Software Mansion's help along the way.

How was project management arranged and how effective was it?

There is a dedicated project manager on each of our projects and they are good about making sure that the appropriate resources are staffed and not blocked and that timelines are communicated clearly and, if necessary, deadlines met.

What did you find most impressive about this company?

The combination of outstanding engineering skill, organized management, honest communication, and fair cost is extraordinarily hard to find in a firm. Software Mansion is remarkable in that they bring all those elements together.

Are there any areas for improvement?

It's sometimes a little hard to work together because of time zone differences (we are halfway around the world)

BACKGROUND

Please describe your company and your position there.

Klarna was founded in 2005 in Stockholm, Sweden with the aim of making it easier for people to shop online. In the last 15 years, technology has evolved, excited, and transformed the world around us, yet our mission remains as relevant as ever – to make paying as simple, safe and above all, smoooth as possible. Klarna is now one of Europe’s largest banks and is providing payment solutions for 85 million consumers across 205,000 merchants in 17 countries.

Klarna offers direct payments, pay after delivery options and installment plans in a smooth one-click purchase experience that lets consumers pay when and how they prefer to. When the company acquired SOFORT in 2014 the Klarna Group was formed. Klarna is backed by investors such as Sequoia Capital, Bestseller, Permira, Visa and Atomico.

I lead a small cross-functional global team that focuses upon extending our Nordic SME domination to the US and other EU markets via creative partnering with game-changing commerce platforms. Our goal is the enablement of the latest Klarna features, preferred placements as competitive advantages, and autonomous global distribution deals.

OPPORTUNITY / CHALLENGE

For what projects/services did your company hire Software Mansion?

Klarna has partnered with Software Mansion to globally integrate with Shopify as a set of alternative payment methods. Shopify enables alternative payment integrations via a Hosted Payments SDK via a redirect from Shopify Checkout. Software Mansion helped architect the hosted payments page, develop the code to integrate to the Shopify API, and support the integration which is currently used by thousands of merchants.

What were your goals for this project?

To enable Shopify merchants to easily integrate Klarna Payments into their Shopify store. Merchants should be able to do this with a quick integration and no coding in their store. Software Mansion not only has to make this integration functional, but it needs to have a user experience to cover a wide range of expectations and skills across many different merchants.

Since Shopify is a SaaS platform, updates must work well for all merchants for each code release. The integration must maintain high standards for uptime and handle merchant load, particularly important during high traffic times, such as Black Friday holiday shopping.

SOLUTION

How did you select this vendor?

Klarna chooses vendors based on skills, experience, cost, and recommendations.

Describe the project and the services they provided in detail.

Software Mansion provides project management, software development, and production support.

What was the team composition?

Software Mansion provides a project manager, multiple developers (front and back end), and on-call support. As needed, we have worked with Software Mansion VP’s as well.

RESULTS & FEEDBACK

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

Software Mansion has always gone above and beyond to make our project successful. Even though we’ve had to work across disparate time zones, Software Mansion has worked very hard to exceed our expectations. One example of exceeding expectations is when we encountered technical obstacles due to API restrictions, Software Mansion came up with creative options to help us get to a reasonable resolution, and always with aplomb and polite consideration.

How was project management arranged and how effective was it?

Klarna and Software Mansion work mainly with recurring video meetings, Slack, and JIRA tickets. There is just the right amount of process and project management to keep the project successful and on track, without wasting anyone’s time on unnecessary efforts. Software Mansion is open to our direction, but also is always looking for ways to improve the cooperation.

What did you find most impressive about this company?

Technical skills are a high on the list of course, but I’ve been most impressed that everyone I’ve worked with at Software Mansion are great people, which makes together so much easier and more enjoyable.

Are there any areas for improvement?

As with any partnership, communication and setting expectations are key. Software Mansion is open to feedback and continual improvement and I can certainly recommend them!

BACKGROUND

Please describe your company and your position there.

I'm co-founder/CTO of Abridge, a health-tech company based out of Pittsburgh

OPPORTUNITY / CHALLENGE

For what projects/services did your company hire Software Mansion?

Software Mansion is contracted to develop new backends and improvements to our existing mobile application

What were your goals for this project?

Our key goal was to improve performance of our mobile app

SOLUTION

How did you select this vendor?

We got connected to Software Mansion via mutual friends

Describe the project and the services they provided in detail.

Project began with a scoping exercise after which the team at Software Mansion worked together with us on designing, building and shipping the solution

What was the team composition?

We had a stable project manager and 2 developers who were pulled in based on the availability

RESULTS & FEEDBACK

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

It will be released in the next 3 weeks, but we are optimistic about the positive impact it could have on our business

How was project management arranged and how effective was it?

Project management was very prompt, frictionless and impressive. We were able to communicate effectively using collaboration tools

What did you find most impressive about this company?

Technical expertise and solid project management

Are there any areas for improvement?

Price estimates were off, but that is understandable given the nature of the project

BACKGROUND

Please describe your company and your position there.

I am the cofounder and CTO of Rainbow. We are a mobile Ethereum wallet with a React Native stack, currently on iOS and soon to be on Android. Our goal is to enable users to easily use the wonderful land of magical internet money that is Ethereum - by earning interest on their crypto holdings, being able to margin trade, and participate in the ecosystem with their assets.

Currently, doing such activities is rather difficult unless you spend a lot of time learning about the space first. We want to make these actions so intuitive that anybody can participate. We are a small team of 3 people (2 engineers and 1 designer who also codes). I work daily as an engineer on this product while also handling administrative duties and partner integrations when necessary.

OPPORTUNITY / CHALLENGE

For what projects/services did your company hire Software Mansion?

We are a small team of 3 people. We had heard about Software Mansion because some of the people we follow and are well regarded in the React Native community work at Software Mansion. We wanted to get as much engineering help as possible (for React Native mobile development, mostly for iOS platform), and as soon as possible, while still taking our time to find the best React Native engineers for full time hires.

We had no other engineers to rely on but ourselves, but the work we wanted to do was much more than what could be done by 3 people at the pace we wanted it. Our challenge was to get as quickly as possible to product market fit, building out the app with all the features we wanted to be a minimum viable product that a user could engage with. Software Mansion had engineers who were much deeper in the stack of React Native than we were, so their unique expertise gave us tremendous leverage.

For instance, their knowledge about React Native internals allowed us to accomplish the sorts of UI navigation, animations and interactions that we wouldn't have been able to do ourselves (at least, not at the same speed.) Also, their flexibility in scheduling allowed us to be dynamic about how much help we could get from them at a very reasonable cost.

What were your goals for this project?

This is an ongoing project. Our goals for this project continue to be creating our many "shots on goal" for product market fit. We are a consumer facing product, and want to introduce "decentralized finance" from the blockchain world to everyday users who may not be too familiar with the blockchain space. In order to accomplish this, we want to have the best user interfaces and interesting experiences that people can find useful and fun for their crypto holdings.

The beauty of the blockchain space is that anybody can participate - you don't need to open up a trading account or be of a certain age to participate. However, it's still too difficult to use the products that are live and available on Ethereum, so we want to change that. The metrics for this include general user numbers, high daily engagement (with some of our experiences that are more interactive), and revenue from commissions on certain features of the product.

Additionally, from a technical perspective, we wanted our code base to have the cutting edge of what React Native could offer - and if it couldn't support it, to help build that out with Software Mansion. Many of the user interfaces we created helped push the open source React Native packages forward.

SOLUTION

How did you select this vendor?

As mentioned in an earlier response, we learned about Software Mansion because some of its people are well regarded in the React Native community. It was easy to find the people as everything is open source, and we can see who the main contributors are. We had discovered the people first, then discovered Software Mansion.

We cared about finding the right people first, instead of rushing to find any dev shop. We had compared 3-4 other shops, some of which also had good people from the React Native community, but who we knew were already fully dedicated to other teams. In the end, we decided to go with Software Mansion because of this respect in the community they had garnered for their talent.

We trusted the quality of the work would be high, as well as motivating for the engineers who partnered with us since they wanted to give back to the open source React Native community, for which our projects would be pushing the cutting edge. We also could define a flexible agreement at very reasonable costs. The whole founding team (just the 3 of us) was involved in the selection process.

Describe the project in detail.

We really enjoy working with Software Mansion, and so we decided a continuous engagement would make sense for us, as there is more than enough work to go around. Even though we have recently made our first hire, we still want to continue working with Software Mansion. Of course, once we grow the team big enough, this may need to change, but for now, this allows us to focus on finding the perfect talent for our team.

With Software Mansion, we didn't have a limited scope of projects - we just had a stream of new features and technical requirements for the capabilities of our codebase (getting our mobile app to do complex navigations and gesture handling, etc). Our design process is mostly on Sketch + Figma, which we share with the developers as new features are announced.

We also enjoyed the fact that the engineers we worked with would take on ownership and make decisions about the product, after understanding the extremely high UI standards we have for a shippable feature. The platforms we developed for thus far were mostly iOS using React Native, but we have recently been working on getting our app working for Android. We have not received any other services from Software Mansion outside of engineering.

What was the team composition?

Ultimately, we were provided with 2 engineers and 1 project manager. It had started out with 1 engineer, then because our scope had increased, we hired 2 more engineers (1 more full time, 1 more part time). At a certain point, we were giving some of these engineers tasks that were "ahead" of our current timeline, but we later realized this was a tricky situation to manage, as these new features would sit around for a while to get merged, and that in itself required more overhead.

So we decided to slow down and not get too ahead of ourselves, instead focusing everyone on "current" issues. We ended up not needing the 3rd engineer as we decided to be more disciplined about our scope. We've had 2 engineers steadily since then. The project manager came in at some later point, as Software Mansion felt the role would be helpful and asked us about how we thought about this.

We felt especially comfortable with this because the project manager's time was not an additional cost for us. It was a win-win because communication could be eased, without the stress of extra costs when our main priorities were for shipping the product (and getting as much engineering help as possible.)

RESULTS & FEEDBACK

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

We were able to ship our product live onto the App Store! We were also able to overcome navigation and gesture handling challenges that we were facing for the type of UI we were designing. As this is a continuous engagement, we are still working on adding more features.

Our initial expectations were that we would be able to ship more features sooner (I think this is generally how it goes for everyone), but at the time, we did not realize that the limitations of React Native were an issue for us until we got to the point where we wanted to build some features. Of course, the limits of React Native is not Software Mansion's responsibility, but the engineers were able to expand the functionality of the React Native libraries they contributed to, in order to help us meet our needs.

We have had excited feedback from our users for the "fun" nature of our app and the look and feel, with intuitive data. We are also excited to be shipping more features which will help drive user numbers up. It is still a niche user base. As we are not finished, there is no final app, just the current app, which of course still has minor bugs that are currently de-prioritized compared to all the new features we want to include. To be clear, Software Mansion engineers do not write buggy code - it's just the nature of complex apps that bugs will arise for edge cases.

How effective was the workflow between your team and theirs?

Software Mansion recommended that we receive help from a project manager, so it has been very helpful. Our workflow has evolved over time, and now we have come to a steady flow of using Linear for task assignments, as well as a weekly call to sync up on what's next. Software Mansion is extremely proactive about getting feedback and making sure that communications are transparent, and that there are no surprises.

I really appreciate that - and this feedback goes both ways, to make sure that we and the engineers are all happy. Software Mansion is in Poland and we are in New York, so there is a time difference there. We have not really experienced issues caused by time differences, as we have everyone on Slack, and use async communication regularly. We have not experienced any issues caused by language barriers, as everyone speaks English.

What did you find most impressive about this company?

We really appreciate the high quality and proactive nature of Software Mansion employees. We appreciate their contributions to the open source community and their expertise. We haven't worked with other vendors, but we know that we are happy with the work from Software Mansion that we haven't wanted to look for other vendors.

Are there any areas for improvement?

I frankly cannot think of anything to be done differently. For any new team of people, there is a learning curve for how to work well and communicate with each other. Software Mansion has been on top of it in asking for our feedback in order to get this learning curve to be shorter.

BACKGROUND

Please describe your company and your position there.

We are a solution provider for the broadcast television industry. Our main solution is a software/hardware package for managing IP based cameras that TV stations place on towers and buildings for weather, community and local video from around the cities they serve. I am the owner, one of the developers and manager of the product line.

OPPORTUNITY / CHALLENGE

For what projects/services did your company hire Software Mansion?

Software Mansion provides deep technical capability and expertise for the development of the firmware/software for our hardware Linux based multi-channel AVC/HEVC decoder.

What were your goals for this project?

My main goal was to establish an ongoing relationship with a team on whom I could rely for expertise in C++ and implementation of specialized libraries to enable and enhance our hardware for the broadcast industry.

SOLUTION

How did you select this vendor?

After considering 2 others it was very clear that Software Mansion had the expertise and capability - but also a culture with which I was very comfortable. Their expertise on several key libraries we use, including GStreamer and other AVC and HEVC libs as well as REACT was very important. Their approach to project management was very open in that the project manager they assign acts as a resource to get the ball rolling, but most interaction occurs directly between the product manager (my) and the developers.

Describe the project and the services they provided in detail.

Software Mansion provided developers who were able to completely rewrite a terribly flawed front-end web based control application (I had hired someone locally that was not very good). They rewrote it using REACT and did an outstanding job. They also took over the work for our main hardware decoder that runs Linux and uses an OEM HDSDI video card from AJA Video. They had the necessary expertise to add significant new functionality and improve performance beyond my expectation.

What was the team composition?

The team normally consists of a project manager and one or two programmers. Lately we've been using a single programmer.

RESULTS & FEEDBACK

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

Software Mansion is a very important part of our business model. Without their expertise and capabilities, our product line would not be complete.

How was project management arranged and how effective was it?

Project management works best as a resource when you need coordination or additional resources - and with Software Mansion it works very well. Most interaction is directly between our company's product management and developers and the Software Mansion Developers - which is perfect.

What did you find most impressive about this company?

They were able to take over an existing code base and make significant improvements. In once case they rewrote it entirely (I had already known it needed to be re-written). In the other case the C++ code was a bit clunky and inefficient. We do not have the luxury of rewriting that - it is dependent on many pre-existing open-source libraries. The Software Mansion Developer was able to make enough significant changes that it vastly improved performance and added tremendous new capabilities.

Are there any areas for improvement?

While there are always areas that can be improved - I've worked with remote teams enough to recognize that Software Mansion has structured itself to make working with remote programmers as painless as possible! If I were to nit-pic I might ask that comments for code check-in were more extensive.