Instil

I'm the senior engineering manager for the high performance versions of multiple developer tooling products.

The goal was to accelerate product development and support existing dev teams with expert engineers that could hit the ground running and quickly ramp into the technical stack. The overall goal was to accelerate delivery of features across multiple products.

The Instil team have a strong reputation for quality and technical excellence. They were flexible with timings and comfortable integrating into existing team structures.

We got the Instil team into the standard company development practices. They were fully treated like existing staff and participated in feature kickoff, scope definition, build, test, communicate to community, define success metrics and measure post release.

We had between 7-10 staff from Instil working as a team with us over the course of the engagement. The positions varied from 'developer', 'senior developer' and 'principal developer'.

The deliverables were to a very high quality and performance standard. As the overarching goal was to ship more value for customers across multiple developer tooling products, we eventually experienced an uptick in CSAT and as a lagging metric revenue and renewals.

The Instil team participated in the company development process, so they adhered to the version of Agile delivery that we practiced. They engaged directly with other teams to manage dependencies and ensure communication was strong. We found them to be proactive, responsive and asking the correct questions and the right time.

We were impressed with how well they integrated into the internal team's ways of working. This meant that they acted and behaved as a team of full time employees. Their technical ability shone through and the speed at which they ramped on the product challenges and tech stack, meant that they were effective quickly.

Nothing specifc.

I'm the director of software development at an electronics manufacturer.

We needed support to design and implement a UI for one of our next-generation platforms to have new capabilities and ultimately increase sales.

Initially, we spoke with Instil about our project's objective and the type of staffing we needed. We also defined the deliverables and process to follow. Instil has designed a new UI for our product and worked on UX and implementation, using JavaScript, TypeScript, and Node.js for custom software development.

We work with around five software engineers and a couple of UX designers. We've also worked with a QA tester and a project manager.

My company had previously worked with Instil years ago. When I joined the company, my team told me Instil had done a good job, so I went back to them.

We started working with Instil in the fall of 2021, and our engagement is ongoing.

Instil's development process is quick and has helped us save time, meeting our expectations.

I want to shout out Neil's (Principal Engineer) work.

Instil is capable of working with ambiguity, being able to work through it, and coming up with good proposals.

Instil's prices are a little bit expensive, and I'd prefer to have less oversight costs and more development costs.

I suggest providing Instil guidance to work on your project because they're very good at finding their way.

I am the Chief Technology & Product Officer of a Document Automation Company

Document generation and electronic delivery for financial service institutions including fully digital eClosing and other digital tools for both consumer and B2B customers.

Referral

6-10 Employees

Integrate third-party libraries with proprietary functionality to build a new "print engine" (PDF renderer) that aggregates data with proprietary HTML-based templates to generate documents. Requirements included meeting all current print engine functionality and capabilities while expanding with new mark-up to streamline template creation and editing as well as enhancing the Accessibility capabilities of the final PDF output. Additional functionality was required to also be able to produce SmartDoc XML outputs to match the PDF content and meet the MISMO SmartDoc standard.

Print Engine and SmartDoc products were delivered with the highest quality and on-schedule (sometimes ahead). The team was quickly able to ramp up and become familiar with the both the high-level objectives and the details needed to be effective. The team members operated in parallel with internal resources and in the process became very knowledgeable and able to guide the future roadmap.

Instil was great at project management with weekly meetings and written report-outs to track progress. They were willing to quickly adapt when needed and flexible to meet shifting priorities.

Instil provided high quality resources who were able to quickly integrate with the teams - able to self-direct to come up to speed quickly and not be overly rigid in needing formal requirements to get started.

Nothing comes to mind.

I am the CTO of Trafalgar Entertainment; we are a theater business.

We have an e-commerce portion of our business that has primarily been built through acquisitions. We needed to create a new e-commerce site in a short amount of time and didn’t have those skills within our organization. We hired Instil for this web development.

We wrote a project brief to give Instil an idea of what we wanted to build and the technology stack we were looking to work with. Instil has been responsible for building the e-commerce website. We’ve launched the first MVP and are now working on rolling the site out for our other venues. Key technologies include Vercel, Next.js, and TypeScript.

We work with about eight individuals from Instil.

Instil was a recommendation. We sent a brief to multiple companies and had them respond with their ideas. We also sent out brand guidelines for the companies to work with and eventually decided to move forward with Instil.

We’ve spent about £250,000 (approximately $310,000 USD).

We started working together in April 2023, and the engagement is ongoing.

Instil’s work has certainly met our expectations. They’ve been able to handle everything that we’ve needed.

We work in an Agile environment. We meet weekly to plan, and Instil has hit deadlines.

We’d like to shout out Matthew (Principal Software Engineer); he’s been phenomenal to work with.

Their team is extremely talented and knows exactly what they’re doing. Instil has been extremely helpful throughout this process. Instil has helped build a culture in our organizational systems that has enhanced how we work. They have been extremely collaborative, and their team is relaxed and easy to work with.

There’s nothing we can come up with.

Trust the Instil team; if you let them solve the problem through their processes, you’ll be successful.

I serve as an Engineering Manager for one of the top observability software vendors.

Our product works with Java Virtual Machines (JVM) and while we have the in-house knowledge to support our customers using the Java language, we have a dearth of technical experience with the Scala language. Through professional contacts that knew about Instil, we engaged them to initially provide Scala engineering expertise and over time, expanded that to include Java, augmenting our team's overall capacity.

One of our software architects had worked with Instil previously, so we initiated discussions on that basis. We agreed to an engagement because we determined that their engineers had the right technical depth needed and because their management style seemed to ensure that we would have a productive, efficient engagement.

Our Instil engineers wrote Scala code perfectly designed to integrate with out product. They took the time to understand and master our codebase and they were even able to offer improvement suggestions on sections of code that have not been frequently touched by even our own engineers.

We had two engineers working with us full-time. Their levels of expertise were at the lead/senior level.

We were able to exceed our Scala related deliverables - we were able to provide our customers with support for more than 12+ Scala-specific frameworks, 10+ database drivers and implemented more than 15 + internal product tests. These were all net-new deliverables and enhancements to our product - functionality that did not exist prior to our engagement with Instil.

They seamlessly adapted to our style. They were added to our Slack channel, attended the meetings we requested, etc. For the most part, we had them working side-by-side with our in-house engineers and they were flexible enough to accommodate all our requests.

The technical level of expertise of their engineers. Great engineers are hard to find and the two we had working with us were clearly top-notch.

We would have loved to have permanently hired the two engineers they assigned to us!