Staff Augmentation for Software Startup

Solution

What was the scope of their involvement?

Arcanys is our remote engineering team. They’re building an extended development team for us. They recruit local engineers in the Philippines and train them to staff various client projects. Team members are assigned to projects based on their skill set and the client’s requirements. Typically companies go to them for engineering support, and they find the talent in their trained pools and staff the projects. They act as staffing agent for clients like us who want to build a remote team.

Their software engineers are their employees, but they work on our project full-time. Our headquarter team (in the Bay Area) design the products and manages the projects. We also manage the Arcanys engineers assigned to our projects in the same way as we manage our own employees.

What is the team composition?

We have two backend engineers and one frontend. Soon, we’ll add one QA and one scrum master.

How did you come to work with Arcanys?

It was through a referral. The managing director of our accelerator used Arcanys before — he highly recommended them. We then met with Arcanys virtually a couple of times and were impressed with their offerings. We started with one engineer for a few months and then expanded to five later.

How much have you invested in them?

We pay the agency every month, and we plan to spend $200,000 with them this year.

What is the status of this engagement?

We started working together in May 2021, and our relationship is ongoing.

Results & Feedback

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

We look to maximize the value and outcome of our engineering investment. Arcanys delivers on that front - high value over cost in terms of quality and efficiency. We’re very happy with Arcanys. They're our trusted technical partner.

Moreover, they provide solid work and deliver on time. We don’t have to micromanage them. Arcanys’ team works hard and can troubleshoot, which is a great quality.

How did Arcanys perform from a project management standpoint?

In our case, we manage our own project. We manage the our own engineers and the Arcanys engineers on our project all together in the same way. We have weekly meetings and daily updates using zoom, slack and a couple of other communication and collaboration tools. Arcanys’ team is pretty easy to work with. Overall, it has been working well without any major issues. 

We use Asana for project management and Slack and Zoom for communication. Asana has worked fine for us, so we’ve stuck with that. They’ve also made several recommendations, and we’ve followed some of them. We just pick and choose what works the best for us.

What did you find most impressive about them?

What Arcanys has impressed me the most is their training and support. They not only recruit the engineers, but have their architect-level senior engineers from Europe and the US work as trainers to train their engineers in the Philippines to follow the software development framework and processes that are mostly used in the US or Europe. It makes a big difference because their engineers can pickup the project quickly and dovetail with our team nicely. 

The other thing that stands out is their support. Software development is a multidisciplinary process, and they have a very comprehensive support structure. Besides developers, they also offer support in UX/UI design, QA, project management, scrum masters, and architecture design and review to guide the project. They can help with many aspects of software development.

Are there any areas they could improve?

No, we’re very happy with them so far.

Do you have any advice for potential customers?

Arcanys has been growing fast because of the high demand. If you're interested in working with them, I'd recommend to reach out early as it may take time to find and train the right talents for your project. It's also in their best interest to make sure that you have the right person.