Solwey Consulting

BACKGROUND

Introduce your business and what you do there.

I’m the founder and CEO of a B2B SaaS platform. We provide governance risk and compliance software to our clients.

OPPORTUNITY / CHALLENGE

What challenge were you trying to address with Solwey Consulting?

We brought them to provide software engineering services. Since we had several prescriptive solutions that we were writing for specific compliance needs, we wanted to partner with a company that could build the end-to-end functionalities of the module we needed to deliver.

SOLUTION

What was the scope of their involvement?

We give Solwey Consulting our product requirements, and we tell them what problems they need to solve. They help us in refining our deliverables through their scoping services, and they help us determine delivery timelines, scales, and more. However, their main focus is on delivering modules within the compliance and risk field, and their goal is to produce high-quality code and design during the process. They also assist us with a lot of our continuous deployment (CI) and continuous integration (CD) efforts.

Their engineers are in charge of writing and testing the code. Their tech stack includes React and Ruby on Rails (Rails), which are used for front- and backend development, respectively. After that, the team supports us with deployment and troubleshooting services. 

What is the team composition?

We’re working with three people from Solwey Consulting. Andrew (CEO) is our main point of contact, both from a technical and architectural perspective. We also collaborate with their project manager and engineer. 

How did you come to work with Solwey Consulting?

We had terrible experiences with two development firms we chose before Solwey Consulting. What convinced us to work with the team was their glowing reviews. We specifically found them on Upwork. Andrew had an extreme level of experience working on our precise technology stack and working with companies on our scale. Above all, we had confidence that he would mesh well with our internal engineers.

How much have you invested with them?

We spend $200,000 annually.

What is the status of this engagement?

Our ongoing collaboration started in May 2021.

RESULTS & FEEDBACK

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

They produce a large amount of code — that’s not necessarily a good thing, but in this case, the features they’re building are relatively complex so it helps increase the surface area of what we support. Our level of automated testing has also increased by having them around. Overall, they’ve helped us solidify a number of our engineering processes in-house, which isn’t something that a contractor would normally do.

How did Solwey Consulting perform from a project management standpoint?

We use Trello in-house, so we’re in charge of the project management between us. They do get things done, but we don’t necessarily see how they get completed. We’ve had a few discussions with them on that point, but they always manage to deliver so we don’t push them too hard.

What did you find most impressive about them?

On top of providing quality code, they also give us feedback that will help us in the long run; they care about the quality of the architecture of what we’re developing and see to it that we could use it 3–5 years from now. Overall, we feel that they’re an extension of our team rather than just a contracting firm.

Are there any areas they could improve?

They could improve their transparency because it’s a little hard to predict when things are going to arrive. However, it’s also the nature of software development to be unpredictable because things may go wrong during the process. Despite that, we’ve learned how to work with it and it’s not a deal breaker by any stretch.

Do you have any advice for potential customers?

You don’t need to be tech-savvy to work with Solwey Consulting. They’re really good at getting prototypes and demos off the ground to get companies going.