ZestIQ

BACKGROUND

Please describe your company and position.

I am the CTO of Brainy HR

Describe what your company does in a single sentence.

Brainy HR is a cloud-based HR platform - single system of record for people operations. It handles the employee directory and records, time-off requests and approvals, attendance tracking, performance review cycles, and HR reporting - all in one workspace instead of the spreadsheet-plus-email setup. It's aimed at small and mid-sized distributed teams that need structure without the overhead of an enterprise HRIS.

OPPORTUNITY / CHALLENGE

What specific goals or objectives did you hire ZestIQ to accomplish?

• Build BrainyHR, a full-featured HR management SaaS platform from the ground up — covering employee management, performance reviews, time-off tracking, and reporting — delivering the complete product lifecycle from design and development through to go-to-market.

SOLUTION

How did you find ZestIQ?

• Referral
• Other

Why did you select ZestIQ over others?

• Pricing fit our budget
• Great culture fit
• Good value for cost
• Referred to me
• Company values aligned

How many teammates from ZestIQ were assigned to this project?

6-10 Employees

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

• ZestIQ team handled the full development lifecycle for our HR platform — from an early design prototype through architecture, build, testing, and production launch. They were our sole technical partner rather than an extra pair of hands on an existing team.
• Discovery and architecture. They audited our prototype and product requirements, then designed the system architecture: data model, module boundaries, API structure, authentication and role/permission logic, and integration points with third-party services. Deliverable was a documented architecture and technical spec we signed off on before any code was written. Design to front end. They took the design prototype through to a working, responsive interface, refining flows where the prototype didn't hold up under real edge cases (bulk actions, approval chains, permission-restricted views).
•  Development. Core modules were built out and delivered in iterative sprints: employee records and directory, time-off requests and approvals, attendance tracking, performance reviews, notifications, and reporting/exports. We reviewed working builds at the end of each cycle.
• Infrastructure and DevOps. Server architecture and provisioning, environment setup (dev/staging/production), CI/CD pipeline, database configuration and backups, monitoring, and security hardening.
• QA. Functional, regression, cross-browser, and load testing, plus a documented test suite and bug-tracking process. Nothing shipped to production untested.
• Launch and handover. Production deployment, post-launch monitoring and stabilization, technical documentation, and knowledge transfer to our side.

RESULTS & FEEDBACK

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

Delivered a stable, production-ready HR platform serving 55 companies / 1250 active users. Full custom build completed on Laravel across a four-year engagement.

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

• Project management. ZestIQ ran the project in two-week sprints with a shared board we had access to throughout, so we could see what was in progress without asking. Weekly calls plus a written summary after each one — decisions, open questions, what needed input from us. Communication ran through Slack, email and Teamwork software with Nataly and Max as our main point of contact, and we could reach the developers directly when something technical needed sorting out quickly.
• Timelines. Sprint deliverables landed on schedule and the project launched within the agreed window.
• Responsiveness. They pushed back when we asked for things that would have created problems later, and explained the reasoning rather than just declining. When we changed scope mid-project on the time off module, they scoped the impact on timeline and cost upfront and let us decide. Questions got answered same-day during working hours.

What was your primary form of communication with ZestIQ?

• Virtual Meeting
• Email or Messaging App

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

• That they designed for where the product was going, not just what we asked for. Early on we described a single-company setup; they built the data model and permission layer so multi-tenancy wouldn't require a rewrite later. When we did need it, it was a feature, not a refactor. Most agencies build exactly the spec you hand them.

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

• During the longer build stretches, there were weeks where we'd have liked more visibility between sprint demos. Nothing was going wrong, but as a non-technical team, silence felt like a risk. They adjusted once we said so — a short mid-sprint written check-in was enough.