A collaborative and customer-centric partner, Sonatafy Technology has built a great relationship with the client in order to execute a seamless workflow. They’ve been extraordinary to produce strong deliverables and prompt in providing progress updates. The team is also punctual and hard-working.
“They have been very focused on delivering great service to our company.”
The Client
Please describe your company and your position there.
Akido Labs is an impact-focused, Y Combinator company being used nationwide to combat the Covid-19 pandemic, homelessness, and other public health crises. Across the country, health systems and government service providers use Akido to launch new technology-powered public health initiatives that improve the health and well-being of the communities they serve. My current role at Akido Labs is Engineering Manager
The Challenge
For what projects/services did your company hire Sonatafy Technology, and what were your goals?
We needed development support to launch a number of key features in our web and native mobile applications. Our goal was to quickly find talented engineers, close to our team’s timezone (PST), in order to add capacity to meet increasing demand.
The Approach
How did you select Sonatafy Technology and what were the deciding factors?
Sonata was recommended to us by a colleague and we ended up selecting them due to their laser focus on our needs and willingness to partner with us and adapt to our existing recruiting process, which was a huge help and a level of service above and beyond what we had experienced from similar vendors. They demonstrated a solid understanding of the skills we needed and very quickly established a pipeline of candidates, and a weekly cadence of status updates such that we always felt we had great visibility into how the process was moving ahead, potential obstacles, etc.
Describe the scope of work in detail, including the project steps, key deliverables, and technologies used.
The application development work was largely focused on adding additional engineering resources to work on our React and React Native client applications. Node and Ruby were also used at different stages of the project.
How many people from the Sonatafy Technology team worked with you, and what were their positions?
We worked with 3 full-stack engineers provided by Sonata, as well as with Joseph Hoffman who managed the relationship.
Can you share any measurable outcomes of the project or general feedback about the deliverables?
Though i can’t speak to the specific projects, probably the most significant outcome is that we ended up having long working relationships with the three engineers that we found via Sonata that spanned multiple projects. They’ve been exceptional to work with and feel very much a part of our team.
Describe their project management style, including communication tools and timeliness.
While we were actively reviewing candidates, Sonata made sure to do weekly status update meetings and report outs, which were very help to maintain visibility over progress. Everything was timely and professional throughout.
What did you find most impressive or unique about this company?
They have been very focused on delivering great service to our company. They are always willing to go the extra mile to meet us where we are on process and help coordinate logistics (for example, when we had one of our Sonata-based engineers join us for an on-site). As much as they’ve done a great job bringing us candidates, they also give us the room to manage them and incorporate them into our team in a way that exceeds what I would have expected.
Are there any areas for improvement or something they could have done differently?
We were interested in partnering with Sonata to add more engineers to our team, but at the time (2019 I believe) it didn’t seem like those candidates were available. We weren’t able to expand at that time as we had hoped, but throughout that process, Sonata was very communicative about extra steps they were taking to increase the volume of potential candidates, and I have no doubt that our requirements, as well as the market at the time, didn’t make that job easy.
