Heaviside Group

Please describe your company, your role, and the industry you operate in.

We are a Insurance company based in Hamburg, Germany. My role as VP of Technology at NordTech Logistik GmbH means I sit at the intersection of business goals and technical delivery — which means I care a lot about vendors who can translate between both.

What specific problem or business challenge led you to hire this company?

We had a clear product vision for our next growth phase in the Insurance market but the CRM Development expertise we needed was not something we could recruit for on our timeline. An external specialist was the pragmatic answer.

What services did the company provide for your project?

End-to-end CRM Development delivery with particular focus on the data migration and integration workstreams, which carried the highest project risk. A dedicated QA resource was embedded throughout development and they left us with a proper operations runbook at handover.

Why did you choose this company over other providers you considered?

We shortlisted five vendors. Two were eliminated immediately based on the technical proposals. Of the remaining three, this team's CRM Development approach was the most specific and evidenced — actual Insurance reference cases, not generic slides. The reference calls confirmed what the proposal described.

How clearly did the company understand your requirements and business goals?

Thoroughly. The requirements document they produced was detailed enough that our QA team used it directly to write acceptance criteria. Every story had a defined business outcome attached. Nothing was left to interpretation, which paid dividends all the way through to testing.

How was your overall experience with their communication and project management?

I used to chase status updates weekly on vendor engagements. This was the first time I did not have to. Updates came consistently, problems surfaced early, and the shared project board always reflected reality rather than optimism.

Did the company deliver the project on time and within your expected budget?

Yes on both. There was one sprint where a third-party API dependency introduced a one-week slip. They flagged it three weeks before it became critical, presented two options, and we agreed on one that recovered the timeline within the same sprint. That kind of foresight is the difference between good and average project management.

What tangible results or business impact have you seen since the project was completed?

Four months live. User adoption exceeded our first-month target by around 20%. Support volume is down. Features we had deferred for years because the old architecture made them too expensive to build are now in active development. The platform opened our roadmap.

What did you like most about working with this company?

The directness. When our requirements were unclear, they said so. When our priorities were contradictory, they explained why. When a technical approach we assumed was right had significant downsides, they told us before we committed. That kind of honesty is what I actually want from a technology partner.

Would you recommend this company to others, and would you work with them again?

Absolutely. We are scoping a second engagement and I expect this to become a multi-year partnership. For anyone in the Insurance space looking for serious CRM Development delivery, I would put them at the top of the evaluation list.

Please describe your company, your role, and the industry you operate in.

Bayern Software KG is a mid-size Sports & Fitness business in Munich, Germany. I joined as Head of Product Management two years ago specifically to modernise how we build and buy technology. This engagement was part of that programme.

What specific problem or business challenge led you to hire this company?

Compliance requirements in our Sports & Fitness space changed and the deadline was set by our regulator, not by us. The Web Development work required was specialist enough that pulling our internal team off the product roadmap to do it was not an option.

What services did the company provide for your project?

Primarily Web Development, with QA and solution architecture included in scope. They owned the build end-to-end from requirements through to go-live, including three existing system integrations. Not needing to coordinate separate QA or architecture vendors was genuinely valuable.

Why did you choose this company over other providers you considered?

We had been through a failed engagement the year before and took vendor selection seriously this time. We asked specific questions about how they handle scope change, estimate work, and communicate problems. The answers were consistent across everyone we spoke to, which suggested the process was real rather than sales-trained.

How clearly did the company understand your requirements and business goals?

The requirements process took longer than we expected but the thoroughness showed in the development phase — we had noticeably fewer mid-sprint clarifications and no major requirement changes that required rework.

How was your overall experience with their communication and project management?

Very strong on the async side, which mattered given the time difference between Munich, Germany and the delivery team. Written updates were specific and consistent, decisions got responses the same day, and nothing was dropped across a five-month engagement. That discipline is harder than it looks.

Did the company deliver the project on time and within your expected budget?

On time and on budget. The estimation accuracy was the part I found most impressive — they had broken the work down thoroughly enough during discovery that the forecast held throughout rather than drifting with every scope conversation. We had one change request, and it was for scope we had added ourselves.

What tangible results or business impact have you seen since the project was completed?

The ROI case we presented to the board was intentionally conservative. We are tracking to hit the payback point in under twelve months against an eighteen-month model. The efficiency gains have exceeded the forecast, partly because the data quality the new system produces enables decisions the previous one could not support.

What did you like most about working with this company?

They kept the business objective visible throughout technical decision-making. I have worked with excellent engineers who lose the strategic thread as complexity increases. This team maintained a clear link between every architectural choice and the outcome we had agreed to achieve.

Would you recommend this company to others, and would you work with them again?

Yes. I would specifically recommend them for Web Development projects where getting the requirements right at the start is critical. That is where they earn their fees — and the downstream delivery reflects it.

Please describe your company, your role, and the industry you operate in.

Saudi Cloud Holdings is a mid-size Gaming & Gambling business in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia. I joined as Director of Technology two years ago specifically to modernise how we build and buy technology. This engagement was part of that programme.

What specific problem or business challenge led you to hire this company?

Honestly, we had been deferring this Digital Marketing investment for eighteen months. User feedback had been consistent and our conversion data confirmed the impact. We eventually ran out of reasons to delay.

What services did the company provide for your project?

The core engagement was Digital Marketing delivery. During discovery they also provided technical consultancy that materially improved our requirements — things we would not have caught until development if they had not raised them. They also took ownership of the third-party integrations that had caused problems in previous projects.

Why did you choose this company over other providers you considered?

We had a fixed budget and a non-negotiable timeline. Several vendors told us it could not be done. These were the ones who said it could and explained clearly why. They turned out to be right.

How clearly did the company understand your requirements and business goals?

The requirements process took longer than we expected but the thoroughness showed in the development phase — we had noticeably fewer mid-sprint clarifications and no major requirement changes that required rework.

How was your overall experience with their communication and project management?

I used to chase status updates weekly on vendor engagements. This was the first time I did not have to. Updates came consistently, problems surfaced early, and the shared project board always reflected reality rather than optimism.

Did the company deliver the project on time and within your expected budget?

Yes. I had privately planned for a contingency given the integration complexity involved. None of it was needed. Final invoice came in within rounding of the approved budget and we launched on the agreed date. That outcome is less common than vendors would have you believe.

What tangible results or business impact have you seen since the project was completed?

We went live six weeks ago so it is early. The launch was clean, adoption is tracking ahead of plan, and the first client demo of the new platform generated a positive reaction we had not seen for the previous version. Ask me again in six months and I will have better numbers.

What did you like most about working with this company?

Team continuity. The engineers who ran the discovery sessions built the system. That consistency over a five-month engagement is valuable in ways that are hard to articulate until you have worked on projects where it was absent. Every conversation built on the previous ones.

Would you recommend this company to others, and would you work with them again?

Absolutely. We are scoping a second engagement and I expect this to become a multi-year partnership. For anyone in the Gaming & Gambling space looking for serious Digital Marketing delivery, I would put them at the top of the evaluation list.

Please describe your company, your role, and the industry you operate in.

We are a Insurance company based in Vancouver, Canada. My role as Director of Platform Engineering at Cascadia Digital Ventures means I sit at the intersection of business goals and technical delivery — which means I care a lot about vendors who can translate between both.

What specific problem or business challenge led you to hire this company?

A competitor move accelerated our timeline by six months. A IT Managed Services investment that had been planned for next year suddenly needed to happen now. Internal build was not viable — we needed to find the right external team quickly.

What services did the company provide for your project?

The stated scope was IT Managed Services delivery. In practice they also contributed to product strategy conversations, flagged gaps in our requirements, and produced integration documentation that our partner vendors later told us was unusually thorough.

Why did you choose this company over other providers you considered?

We had been through a failed engagement the year before and took vendor selection seriously this time. We asked specific questions about how they handle scope change, estimate work, and communicate problems. The answers were consistent across everyone we spoke to, which suggested the process was real rather than sales-trained.

How clearly did the company understand your requirements and business goals?

Honestly, better than we understood them ourselves going in. The workshops they ran surfaced assumptions we had not examined and caught three requirements that were in direct conflict with each other. Resolving those before development started saved us a significant amount of rework.

How was your overall experience with their communication and project management?

Good. The sprint cadence worked well for our team. Fortnightly reviews gave us the checkpoints we needed. The one friction point — time zone overlap — was resolved after the first sprint and did not reoccur.

Did the company deliver the project on time and within your expected budget?

On time and on budget. The estimation accuracy was the part I found most impressive — they had broken the work down thoroughly enough during discovery that the forecast held throughout rather than drifting with every scope conversation. We had one change request, and it was for scope we had added ourselves.

What tangible results or business impact have you seen since the project was completed?

Hard to isolate perfectly given other business variables, but the metrics attributable to the IT Managed Services work are meaningful — session time up, conversion up, error rate down, NPS for the digital channel improved by double digits. Account managers say it is coming up positively in client conversations for the first time.

What did you like most about working with this company?

Honestly, the quality of the questions they asked. It sounds simple but good questions at the start of a project make everything easier. Their discovery process was better than any briefing our internal team would have run independently.

Would you recommend this company to others, and would you work with them again?

Yes, with the caveat that they are not the cheapest option and they are selective about what they take on. If price is the primary criterion there are alternatives. If you want a IT Managed Services partner in the Insurance space who will actually deliver against a serious brief, this is the team.