Mokriya

BACKGROUND

Please describe your organization.

I work for a large Fortune 500 technology company.

What is your role at the company?

I am the director of application technologies.

OPPORTUNITY / CHALLENGE

What business challenge were you trying to address with Mokriya?

We needed engineering help to create robust and state-of-the-art mobile applications, SDKs, and mobile platforms for wearable devices.

SOLUTION

Please describe the scope of their involvement in detail.

Mokriya helped us create a wearable with coaching capabilities and created an application platform for wearables for both Android and iOS systems.

How did you come to work with Mokriya?

I interviewed multiple candidates that had hands-on mobile development experience. I was also looking for people that possess leadership skills and could work well in agile, fast-paced, startup-like environments. The engineers at Mokriya fit that description the best.

What is the status of this engagement?

The mobile platforms were completed and released in just three months. The other wearable products took about nine months to finish.

RESULTS & FEEDBACK

Could you share any statistics or metrics from this engagement?

The platform was launched in three months at great quality. They also built-in additional features, which was very impressive in such a short timeframe.

What distinguishes Mokriya from other providers?

The people we worked with had an extreme sense of leadership and ownership. Mokriya's engineers integrated into our team seamlessly, and what really set them apart is that they treated the project as if it was their own.

In hindsight, are there areas in which they could improve or things you might do differently?

There is not much to improve. Their team works great both together and with others. I have no criticism other than to keep doing what you're doing.

BACKGROUND

Please describe your organization.

I work for TrueCar, a modern car buying marketplace that connects buyers to certified sellers and compares pricing with what other people have paid in the past six months.

What is your position?

I am the vice president of experience. I oversee user experience, visual design, and research.

OPPORTUNITY / CHALLENGE

What business challenge were you trying to address with Mokriya?

It was an interesting engagement. We were in the middle of another significant product development process that I didn't want to interrupt but, at the same time, I wanted to explore the future of our consumer-facing product. We engaged with Mokriya to help us build a creative prototype without disrupting the workflows that were already going on.

SOLUTION

Please describe the scope of their involvement in detail.

There were four full-time developers that did primarily front-end development and some integration with our existing data services and internal APIs [application programming interfaces]. The end goal was to build a demo for our stakeholders, dealers, and manufacturers. It wasn't a traditional engagement, but it was very creative, and the developers played a big role in helping us develop the concept.

How did you come to work with Mokriya?

A couple of friends that I had worked with in the past ended up working at Mokriya and, when an opportunity arose, I engaged with them directly. I was incredibly happy with the results.

Could you provide a sense of the size of this initiative in financial terms?

It was a multiyear engagement that was more than $200,000.

What is the status of this engagement?

We started working with them mid- to late 2014 and finished at the end of 2015. Although we aren't working together presently, they are definitely a company that I look forward to working with again in the future.

RESULTS & FEEDBACK

Could you share any statistics or metrics from this engagement?

There are no results because it was a prototyping exercise and not something that we were working to produce. However, about 75 percent of the work that they did, which was just concepting, ended up making it into our production environments.

How did Mokriya perform from a project management standpoint?

They were fantastic. We had a lead developer in Portugal, Fabio Bernardo, who we did not need to manage at all. He was always thinking about how to make the product better and coming up with ideas to test. You could give the team an idea and they would come back a day later with something finished that was better than what you originally thoughty of. They were constantly taking our ideas and improving upon them. Doing that in terms of design is great, but doing that in terms of code is unbelievable. They helped us take a look at our development process and improve it.

What distinguishes Mokriya from other providers?

There are many companies that you can engage with that will provide you development talent. Mokriya has managed to find developers that are engaged in solving problems, which is very hard to come by. Their developers are actually interested in the business and engage in the problem you're trying to solve. They are the creative thinkers, which is exactly what we were looking for.

Is there anything Mokriya could have improved or done differently?

This was our problem as much as theirs, but some of the operational stuff around contracting and account maintenance lacked structure.

BACKGROUND

Please describe your organization.

I work at a Fortune 500 IT [information technology] company.

What is your position?

I work as a product marketing manager. I manage all the mobile applications for our brand of consumer apps.

OPPORTUNITY / CHALLENGE

What business challenge were you trying to address with Mokriya?

We are trying to build a mobile application for Lightning-based flash drives, which are basically USB drives for iPhones and iPads. We engaged Mokriya to help us build this first of its kind iOS application.

SOLUTION

Please describe the scope of their involvement in detail.

We worked with Mokriya for a six-month period on the first iteration of the application, which was on iOS. We again worked with them on our second iteration of the product, which was also about six months long and just launched last month [April 2016]. The work they did on the first iteration was remarkable, so we decided to work with them on the second phase.

How did you come to work with Mokriya?

There are a lot of vendors out there with developers that can build strong code, but one of the things I was looking for was passion. I wanted to work with a company that was interested in more than the project and that had a true sense of ownership. I found Mokriya to fit very well.

They have their own Craigslist app, and they're doing work with a lot of startups. I looked at all the work they've done and the skill set that they have in terms of their depth of knowledge around the iPhone operating system. Mokriya fit those requirements as well.

Could you provide a sense of the size of this initiative in financial terms?

It was between $100,000 and $200,000. We had two developers and a project manager working full time for six months.

What is the status of this engagement?

The first phase of the project started in May 2014, and the first iteration was launched in November of that year. The second phase just ended and that iteration was launched in April of this year [2016].

RESULTS & FEEDBACK

Could you share any statistics or metrics from this engagement?

This whole project was basically an experiment for my company. We weren't sure how consumers would react to the product, but it was very successful because we sold more than one million units. Our app experience was significantly superior to what was already out there in the market, and it has consistently held four-plus stars in the App Store for the past two years. We believe the second iteration will be very well received as well.

How did Mokriya perform from a project management standpoint?

In my experience, when you work on a mobile app project with a company like Mokriya, there is usually a fixed statement of work. However, although we try to estimate the amount of effort and work, often the scope increases during the project because we learn something we didn't know before. One of the things I really like about Mokriya is that they are flexible and adapt very well as the project changes.

Sometimes, vendors only care about the project and not the product, but Mokriya is not like that. They understand that things are subject to change as the project goes on and that their resources need to be flexible. They allocated well, and they understood the complexity of the project.

What distinguishes Mokriya from other providers?

One of the best things about Mokriya was their flexibility around the scope and definition of the project. They were able to adjust when unknowns came about. They were able to take additional responsibility than what was originally asked of them, and they did that very well.

Is there anything Mokriya could have improved or done differently?

One of the challenges our company had with Mokriya is that their resources are scattered across the world. They have staff in the United States, Israel, Portugal, and India, which made it hard to coordinate between time zones. Sometimes, they have very good talent and, sometimes, they have average talent. It would be more convenient if all the developers were equally skilled.