Valor Software

BACKGROUND

Please describe your company and your position there.

SalesGig provides outsourced cold calling as a service for small- to mid-sized B2B companies on a fractional basis to increase market reach, awareness, and fill the funnel with targeted opportunities. I am Founder and CEO

OPPORTUNITY / CHALLENGE

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

Valor built our marketing site, landing pages, operational platform, integrated vendors, and helped design our investor template. They help us with design, project management, development, and testing.

What were your goals for this project?

Build an exceptional platform and marketing to impress our clients.

SOLUTION

How did you select this vendor?

This company and team crushed it! They are excellent. In fact, I refer them business as a very happy customer.

Describe the project and the services they provided in detail.

They provided full service design, development, pm, and support.

What was the team composition?

We have multi level developers, project manager, designer, and testing team.

RESULTS & FEEDBACK

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

Our website speaks to their level of quality.

How was project management arranged and how effective was it?

They meet weekly via zoom, worked closely on Slack, and honestly feel like they are our team members versus a 3rd party. Great group and easy to work with.

What did you find most impressive about this company?

The level of quality delivered prior to testing was impressive.

Are there any areas for improvement?

Overall they are great. English is very strong, but sometimes we need to review grammar. Not a big deal, but hey no one is perfect.

BACKGROUND

Please describe your company and your position there.

CareerBuilder is a global, end-to-end human capital solutions company focused on helping employers find, hire and manage great talent. Combining advertising, software and services, CareerBuilder leads the industry in recruiting solutions, employment screening and human capital management.

While at CareerBuilder I served as a technology leader and architect for our Talent Discovery Platform.

OPPORTUNITY / CHALLENGE

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

The team was responsible for the vast majority of the creation for our new platform. They also did quite a bit of design support, QA trainings and test coverage. We also had them do a performance benchmark and creation of APIs, including the migration from .net to NodeJS.

What were your goals for this project?

Initially our goals were to have some staff augmentation to get us past the initial hurdles of the project. After some progress was made we realized that Valor is much more valuable than just a few pairs of hands on keyboards. They became mentors to our in-house team and critical to the success of our project.

SOLUTION

How did you select this vendor?

When we were encountering some issues on GitHub with a third party library that Valor maintained Dima (their founder) was helping us to debug them. Through our interactions with him in the Open Source community we realized that there might be an opportunity to work together.

Describe the project in detail.

Initial scope of the project was a re-write of a 7 year old compensation analysis platform. This evolved to encompass the entirety of our Talent Discovery offering which was initially 5 applications. Valor crucial in assisting us in combining into a single platform for the first time.

What was the team composition?

We started off with 1 developer however within two weeks we realized that he was much more productive than our in house team, we rapidly scaled to 7 developers and 5 qa to work on the project.

RESULTS & FEEDBACK

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

In just over a year we took 6 completely disjointed product that were all on separate technology stacks, brought them together and created a platform that became our core product offering for our business.

How effective was the workflow between your team and theirs?

Valor influenced our organizational workflow and actually helped us to create better development flows, qa processes. They truly believe in embedding themselves in the team and becoming

What did you find most impressive about this company?

The personalities and dedicated nature of the team were incredible. I've worked with offshore teams before and in general they have been passive and tend to wait for instructions.

Valor is proactive and conducts their own research and gains their own understanding of not only the platform they are working on but the organization they are working with.

I was amazed to see that they became true "owners" of the platform and were 100% vested in what we were doing. This was refreshing and exciting to see.

Are there any areas for improvement?

I think the biggest area for improvement would be learning to detach more from bad decisions that we (as customers) make. Sometimes as customers we make decisions that are detrimental to the platform or to the team because of a underlying business need.

One of the greatest aspects of Valor is their becoming part of the team, that is also one of their biggest challenges because they also feel the pain of decisions.

BACKGROUND

Introduce your business and what you do there.

We are Gapminder Foundation. It's a non-profit independent and non-religious foundation based in Sweden. We produce educational material for children and adults all around the world, and our mission is to fight devastating ignorance with a fact-based worldview. We provide data visualizations so people can understand what the world really looks like. I am the project manager.

OPPORTUNITY / CHALLENGE

What challenge were you trying to address with Valor Software?

When we first approached Valor Software, we had a very particular project called Dollar Street. The business challenge was to find a way to display millions of photos on one platform, in which people can see and compare them in a very user-friendly way. It's a platform for understanding different standards of living across different income levels with pictures and data.

SOLUTION

What was the scope of their involvement?

Valor Software developed the Dollar Street platform. It’s a very innovative project; it doesn't exist anywhere on the internet yet. They are now working on our CMS in which we want to provide easy ways for the users to contribute by translating content amongst the community. They are also helping us develop our server, which is a backend data project. We combine data from different sources, harmonize it, and put it into one of our visualization tools so that regular users can understand it.

How did you come to work with Valor Software?

We started working with them a long time ago through a freelancing company.

How much have you invested with Valor Software?

We spend approximately $60,000 per month, on average.

What is the status of this engagement?

We started working with Valor Software two and a half years ago, and the partnership is ongoing. Last year, there were approximately 10 developers from Valor Software working in Gapminder's projects. Now they are developing two big projects for us and five smaller sub-projects.

RESULTS & FEEDBACK

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

Dollar Street was the first project, and we are just launching it now. The projects are still ongoing; they haven't been released to the public yet. What I can tell you is that Valor Software is very, very knowledgeable and very helpful. Since we have them, we don't even need a CTO [Chief Technology Officer] anymore. The people at Valor Software are the ones who work as the architects of our infrastructure and our technology. They are affordable, which is very good, and they are extremely helpful. They always provide urgent support when needed. They also are very good at planning. When we share our plans with them, they always give us feedback, telling us what is and isn’t possible. They always come up with very interesting solutions to our problems. They always find a way of implementing the things we want. We have no regrets with Valor Software and we recommend them to everybody.

How did Valor Software perform from a project management standpoint?

They are very, very good at project management. Since they have their own operational manager, they have helped us to manage our projects better by building our roadmap and keeping us within schedule.

What did you find most impressive about Valor Software?

There are many things. I think what sticks out the most is their capacity to find solutions instead of just saying what cannot be done. They know how to develop any feature that we request, and they are very good at user experience. They also know how to communicate with non-tech people. I think that makes them quite special because any client can communicate with them.

Also, for us, they are not that expensive, but they are not the cheapest ones in the world either. We do appreciate how good they are at what they do, so we would like them to be very well compensated for it. I would say, all in all; it's a very good cost for the quality they give us.

Are there any areas Valor Software could improve?

They are the ones helping us to improve, so no. We are very, very happy with them.

BACKGROUND

Introduce your business and what you do there.

The company I worked for at the time we worked with Valor Software is a leading financial and insurance products comparison engine in Dubai. It’s effectively an aggregator where users can find financial products (credit cards, loans, etc.) and apply for them. I was a CTO there.

OPPORTUNITY / CHALLENGE

What challenge were you trying to address with Valor Software?

I was looking to do a whole restructure of our technology infrastructure, which was very old-fashioned and poorly customized. I was looking for a particular technology skill set which was MEAN stack; it’s JavaScript technology end-to-end all the way from the database.

SOLUTION

What was the scope of their involvement?

The whole tech infrastructure was MongoDB in the backend, Node.js as the API [application programming interface], AngularJS on the front-end, and some other technologies around it like ElasticSearch, Nginx, and Redis for caching and for storing sessions. I worked with Valor Software for a bit over a year until we ramped up our in-house team, and then we switched from partially outsourcing to full in-house. They worked on everything from the initial setup of the product specifications and requirements all the way to the first iterations, even helping with the infrastructure and Amazon AWS. I ended up working with a team from Valor up to three or four people at some points on very tight deadlines. It was a tough project, but still, they did very well. They pulled it off.

How did you come to work with Valor Software?

I was looking to find this kind of skillset to build a team in Dubai, and it was very difficult. Those technologies were still new back then. It's always a challenge to find talent, but Dubai is even a bit more so. My second resort was to try and find a company that I could work with remotely. I went through a very rigorous process of trying to find developers that could help me with this implementation, and I ended up finding Valor Software.

How much have you invested with Valor Software?

We spent around $7,000 per month.

What is the status of this engagement?

We worked with Valor Software from April 2014 to June 2015.

RESULTS & FEEDBACK

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

We were trying to work in a sprint mode following agile methodologies. At some point, we ended up being able to track our velocity and our completion rate. We were above 90%, which means the planning and implementation were going well. Regarding the end result and how this impacted the business, throughout that period we grew revenues, we grew traffic, and we dropped loading time, so things worked very well.

Even though we worked in a technology which is feared amongst the SEO community, which is AngularJS, Valor Software pulled it off, and we ended up almost doubling our SEO traffic. That was a case study regarding how AngularJS can be used in an SEO-heavy website. We got featured on MongoDB for the implementation that we had and how MongoDB helped us scale up. Again, the guys played an instrumental part in getting to grips with how MongoDB works and what was the best practice of deployment.

How did Valor Software perform from a project management standpoint?

They were very sharp on that note as well. As I said, we were following agile methodologies in which they were very well versed. They have excellent analytical skills when it comes to breaking down the requirements and being able to figure out the deliverables and the action items.

What did you find most impressive about Valor Software?

I never felt like they were a remote team. Valor Software made it feel like they were here with us, helping all the time. They are very nice and smart people to work with. They have good English, and they are very competent when it comes to the technology area, especially JavaScript.

Are there any areas Valor Software could improve?

In some cases, we went down the road of riskier implementations, which perhaps looked risky to me because I didn’t have that much expertise. The end result, which was very good, proved me wrong. It ended up working fine, and they handled it very well.

BACKGROUND

Please describe your company and position.

I am the VP Engineering of sherpa°

Describe what your company does in a single sentence.

Help travellers move freely and shift how the world's leading travel providers think about travel identification.

OPPORTUNITY / CHALLENGE

What specific goals or objectives did you hire Valor Software to accomplish?

• Develop a Design System
• Staff augmentation

SOLUTION

How did you find Valor Software?

Referral

Why did you select Valor Software over others?

• Great culture fit
• Referred to me
• Company values aligned

How many teammates from Valor Software were assigned to this project?

2-5 Employees

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

Architectural design and development of a in-house design system. Valor engineers worked and collaborated closely together with Sherpa product managers, designers and testers. 

RESULTS & FEEDBACK

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

Completion and integration of the design system and required components. This was an initiated and on-going project turned into maintenance mode.

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

Sherpa took over the project management as Valor engineers had been tightly integrated into our internal teams. Engineers delivered as expected on time and were enabled to bring in their own ideas and thoughts on how the project should be moving forward. 

What was your primary form of communication with Valor Software?

• Virtual Meeting
• Email or Messaging App

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

Valor has been incredibly aligned around the tech stack, general mindset on how to develop software and brings in engineers who are skilled, work independently and can work just as well alone and in larger teams.

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

Keep up the good work and collaboration.