Client Overview:
The client fuses neuroscience and artificial intelligence to hyper-personalize technology. Their behaviorally focused products allow engineers to shape, predict, and analyze human behavior at a neurological level.
The Challenge:
While they needed top-quality engineers to quickly build out a new customer portal, this SaaS client was wary of the long and risky process of recruiting, hiring, and onboarding developers, which was starting to feel like a full-time job, for CTO.
While the company was growing quickly, he needed to spend less time interviewing and more time building and expanding their product, as well as improving customer experience on the website. In 2017, the client found itself in need of a customer dashboard that leveled-up their interactions beyond generating reports and emailing them to customers.
Their new customer-facing portal needed to house and organize all of the customer’s information as well as manage their integrations in an accessible way. Not only was there a great deal of back-end work needed to build the product, but the company hadn’t yet hired a Project Manager or a Designer. Finding an affordable, local developer, capable of handling this combination of back-end and front-end work, as quickly as the CTO needed, seemed like an impossible task.
His priority was avoiding the standard time-consuming and high-risk process that only gives a short amount of time with each candidate and no guarantee of a good fit for the long term. Overall, the client needed a streamlined solution that could increase bandwidth and eliminate logistical worries.
The Solution:
A CPS developer, Jerry joined the SaaS client and was able to hit the ground running on the customer portal since he was already familiar with Rails and VJS for the front end. Not only was he submitting high quality work from the beginning, but he made sense of the chaos and minimal direction that comes with a startup. “Jerry pushed for more structure, good development practices, and setting a schedule and roadmap. One of the first things we all noticed was his professionalism.” While on the job, Jerry has ramped up on Terraform and picked up Java. Because he’s learned so quickly, the CTO is now able to write a feature ticket that the developer will immediately begin working on. He explains, “Our collaboration requires very little intervention at all. I fully trust him to manage and get it done.”
In 2018, the client brought on two more CPS developers. Maryanne’s focus was on DevOps and the company’s sophisticated data processing pipeline, while Ken took over front end development to allow Jerry to focus on the back-end design and architecture. In the past year, Maryanna and Ken have integrated into the team and Jerry has taken on a managerial role, handling project planning, task breakdown, questions, feedback, and regular 1:1s. Because CPS provides developer training and ongoing support, removes worries about internation employee overhead, and provides ease of payment.
Our client can focus on building team culture instead of work structure issues. Today, the client’s team of software engineers includes three CPS developers and three locals who work together daily, overlapping at least five hours. “The whole team participates in everything from daily stand-ups and 1:1s, to company book clubs — they feel like part of the client’s team.”
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