YAWT

BACKGROUND

Please describe your company and position.

I am an executive of Software company

Describe what your company does in a single sentence.

We are a software company.

OPPORTUNITY / CHALLENGE

What specific goals or objectives did you hire Yawt Digital to accomplish?

• API development

SOLUTION

How did you find Yawt Digital?

Clutch Site

Why did you select Yawt Digital over others?

Close to my geographic location

How many teammates from Yawt Digital were assigned to this project?

2-5 Employees

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

Development of a full API with administration panel, online documentation, regular upgrades and monthly maintenance.

RESULTS & FEEDBACK

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

Regular deliveries.

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

They are generally optimistic with their timings but they can also deliver very quickly when required.

What was your primary form of communication with Yawt Digital?

Virtual Meeting

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

They try to truly understand the reasons behind each request and that make a huge difference versus other developers. They challenge solutions if they don't see them as the best fit for the problem. Doing so makes a huge positive difference in the quality of a product.

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

Again if they are slammed with work they should not be afraid to be more realistic with their timings. But this is offset by the quality of the work and the implication of their team.

BACKGROUND

Please describe your company and your position there.

I'm the founder/CEO of a stealth startup building a consumer-facing web application

OPPORTUNITY / CHALLENGE

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

We hired Mwikala through his new agency Yawt Digital (I believe we were the first client of his agency). Our backlog of new features was large and we were seeking a capable Laravel/Vue developer to help increase the velocity of our small team (currently a single developer, part-time UX designer and product owner).

SOLUTION

How did you select this vendor and what were the deciding factors?

We found Mwikala via a LinkedIn ad I posted. He was the only applicant that wrote a decent covering email and had clear and relevant experience. Hiring capable and experienced developers is usually hard so I was pleasantly surprised to find Mwikala without much effort.

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

We used Jira to manage the work and Figma for designs. The stack is Laravel/Vue/Nuxt, also using Vuetify. We gave completed designs to Mwikala and he implemented them in code. He tested locally before deploying to our staging server, and eventually to production.

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

Just Mwikala.

RESULTS & FEEDBACK

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

Our project is too small to have any measurable outputs and the lack of a mature process and a larger in-house development team probably made the work more challenging for Mwikala. Mwikala delivered some quality code but following code reviews a lot of changes were required, particularly around the need for comprehensive testing (even when this is tricky due to use of 3rd party libraries etc).

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

Because Mwikala is essentially an individual developer rather than a multi-person agency, we dictated the communication tools. Mwikala is a good verbal communicator. His written communication is good but there could have been a lot more of it.

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

It was impressive how much technical knowledge Mwikala gave at a very young age.

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

Although Mwikala is very experienced for his age, he requires substantial support to produce shippable code. I wouldn't hesitate to hire him again as part of a larger team with clear processes and more resource devoted to scoping features and running through feedback following PRs etc.

The experience of working with him taught us a lot about how we'll go about scaling our team. If Mwikala had been more self-aware about the need for support and more communicative when he was struggling, then we'd have reduced the amount of frustration. Mwikala is a genuinely lovely guy and not afraid of self-reflection and so I would definitely consider working with him again despite the challenges around his lack of experience.