LeanCode

BACKGROUND

Please describe your company and position.

I am the Engineering Manager of Solflare

Describe what your company does in a single sentence.

Solflare is a comprehensive, non-custodial digital wallet specifically designed for the Solana blockchain, allowing users to securely manage SOL, tokens, and NFTs. It offers a user-friendly interface for advanced features like staking, swapping assets, and interacting directly with decentralized applications (dApps).

OPPORTUNITY / CHALLENGE

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

• Feature Implementation
• Infrastructure Improvement

SOLUTION

How did you find LeanCode?

Online Search

Why did you select LeanCode over others?

• High ratings
• Good value for cost

How many teammates from LeanCode were assigned to this project?

2-5 Employees

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

Ongoing mobile app development and full integration with the team on site.

RESULTS & FEEDBACK

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

We track progress and performance on a monthly basis, focusing on a holistic set of metrics rather than a single outcome. The Leancode team is fully integrated into this company-wide performance tracking system.

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

We were responsible for project management and they for delivery. All deliverables were arriving consistently on schedule. They remained attentive to our requirements throughout the project, providing prompt and practical responses whenever our needs evolved.

What was your primary form of communication with LeanCode?

Virtual Meeting

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

Their Flutter knowledge is impressive, and they are constantly seeking to improve how they work.

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

If I were to offer a minor critique, there is some room for improvement in English language proficiency. Aside from that, I have no significant concerns to note.

BACKGROUND

Please describe your company and your position there.

I'm the CTO of welliba. Welliba’s EX+ platform enables organisations to measure, predict and manage employee experience. At the same time, it provides on-demand, personalised insights and advice to employees.

OPPORTUNITY / CHALLENGE

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

We needed support in developing a new service consisting of a web application and an app. We wanted to develop a market-ready product with a small, flexible team in the shortest possible time. The development was to be done in collaboration with our development team.

SOLUTION

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

We became aware of the provider through several technical articles. The professional presentation and large overlap of the Tech-Stack convinced us.

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

The product is made up of several components. The most important is a web application developed with React and Tailwind CSS. In addition, there is a native app developed with Flutter. The app is used for continuous user interaction and visual presentation of the results. All systems are multilingual and support RTL languages. The CQRS backend is written in C# and uses PostgreSQL as a database. The entire system runs on MS Azure in a Kubernetes cluster. The infrastructure is set up and maintained via Terraform.

Communication with the user is done via a flexible notification system that includes email, push notification, in-app notification, Slack and Teams.

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

A total of 6 people are involved in the project. 1 frontend developer, 2 backend developers, 1 flutter developer, 1 QA specialist, and a scrum master. They work together with the developers from Welliba.

RESULTS & FEEDBACK

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

After a few months, we were able to set up the first projects on the new platform. Currently, new features and improvements are being developed and are being delivered as scheduled.

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

We have very open and constructive communication. Daily stand-ups and weekly retros help us to optimize the processes. We use Slack and GitHub for communication.

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

We're impressed with their very high technical expertise and engagement.

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

No.

BACKGROUND

Introduce your business and what you do there.

I’m the CEO of a software and app development company that is also a medical product producer.

OPPORTUNITY / CHALLENGE

What challenge were you trying to address with LeanCode?

We were new the app development at the outset of the project and needed someone to help us make the correct technology decisions, as well as how to structure the app to get us an MVP.

From there, we needed developers with Flutter skills. This is a relatively new framework, and they already had experience with it.

SOLUTION

What was the scope of their involvement?

We provided the designs and specifications and brought in our own team later on to help with the transition. They used .NET for the web backend.

In terms of key features, they developed a video management tool for testing purposes and cases around video recording issues. If a user has an internet issue or another problem while working with their video, we built in some features that will prevent the footage from being lost.

What is the team composition?

Initially, they assigned two mobile developers and one backend developer, and then a third mobile developer joined later one. The majority of the project has been done with four developers.

How did you come to work with LeanCode?

We interviewed and received proposals from six other providers in addition to LeanCode. After meeting with them, we decided they seemed energetic and were willing to do provide samples of their work.

Additionally, they are solely focused on Flutter technology. They really wanted to understand our product from a business perspective and provide suggestions to improve it. They were also communicative and help us plan everything. We felt very comfortable working with them.

How much have you invested with them?

We’ve spent around $350,000.

What is the status of this engagement?

We worked together from September 2020–December 2021. 

RESULTS & FEEDBACK

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

We’re not marketing the app yet, as we’re waiting for one supply-chain piece; we’re a physical product. We were under budget for the initial MVP and then decided to continue working with them.

Internally, we’ve gotten great feedback in terms of the function and speed of the architecture. We had it independently audited, and the results were that it was structured well and demonstrated good technology choices.

How did LeanCode perform from a project management standpoint?

There was an assigned project manager who I was in-touch with throughout the week. We communicated via Slack and met over Google Meet either once or twice a week. There was no communication barrier.

What did you find most impressive about them?

They were able to look at what our problems are and at our solution should be from a business perspective. Their owner has some startup experience and knew some of what to expect from our partnership.

LeanCode’s team really cared about the success of the product even after our cooperation ended too, asking us how things were going and checking up on how they could help us.

Finally, they were very open when started we hired our own internal team and ensured that they got our new employees up to speed. They remained available to answer or questions, which helped the process be very smooth. They were great with planning.

Are there any areas they could improve?

Many things went well; the only thing that could have been better was communication around the timeline of the engagement and how many developers were needed. This wasn’t a major issue, and when we brought it up, they bent over backward to make us happy. I was very satisfied.

Do you have any advice for potential customers?

Make sure to ask a lot of questions about the experience and technology and include everything that needs to be included in the technology. Plans to implement the wireframes are also very important to possess. From a business standpoint, be open to their suggestions about how best to implement something. They have a lot of young developers with lots of ideas.

BACKGROUND

Please describe your company and your position there.

IRD Group provides business intelligence service to a variety of companies in the media marketing and technology spaces. We provide insights that are sales triggers for business development managers to win new business. I am the owner of the company, we have 15 staff.

OPPORTUNITY / CHALLENGE

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

Our web application had been re-developed around five years previously but was relying on using TLS 1.0 which was going to cease to work on browsers by August 2020 – we had a very hard deadline to review, update and replace the application before it stopped working for our clients.

At the same time we wanted a system that used modern search, UI and cloud based hosting with regular development sprints so it was a significant departure from the old system and way of operating.

SOLUTION

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

We knew we wanted something like Flutter for the mobile app development component of the new job and we knew that developers who had been working with Flutter were exposed to the latest ideas on use of cloud based services and modern design principles. This team had a strong reputation in Europe as a leading Flutter developer so we reached out to them, amongst others, to see if they are interested in a task like this.

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

We started with a very quick prototype test of rebuilding our prime search facility in a modern structure. While there were few other pieces of data or functions, this gave us the ability to sense how the entire system would look and feel post the rebuild.

We then commenced a more structured program working through major functional points within the system and identifying points in time that we could expose this to clients and staff for testing. We had a hard stop of August to provide sufficient functionality for our clients to continue paying us so the focus was strongly on making sure of a functioning operational login, usage, and alerting system that was ready to go as clients started to fail on the old system.

After we had successfully replaced the old system with the new one we then commenced looking at the functionalities that have been skipped to meet the deadline and after those have been completed we then moved on to functionalities that had been considered over time on our wishlist but had been limited due to the underlying technical platform.

How many people from LeanCode team worked with you, and what were their positions?

We had a project manager, a UI specialist a senior backend developer and two backend developers , as well as a senior frontend developer and two developers and a number of other staff who were added as the situation required it.

RESULTS & FEEDBACK

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

We successfully migrated off the old system just as the old system was starting to fail clients, yet all the clients saw the new system as a massive improvement in functionality and capability compared to the old system so it was a very smooth migration for clients rather than being a major business failure point.

The new platform has allowed us to dramatically improve both the depth of the information we provide as well as the functionalities to help people identify key targets. It dramatically lifted our competitiveness and people satisfaction with the office.

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

We mainly worked with two week sprints including a meeting each fortnight looked at upcoming features, test results, and production deployment plans. This allowed our business to focus mainly on its work throughout the program. The team provided clear timelines that allowed us to know we were going to hit our target

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

They always develop with an eye for usability and for a crisp professional and modern look which means that we have now got a system that presents as a very current and capable platform despite providing little or no guidance to the team on how it should look or operate. The team not only delivered what we needed, but they also improved on what we wanted.

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

No.