SPD Technology

I am the senior software engineering manager at Roche. We’re a pharmaceutical company and we build medical devices.

We have a combination of developers working here in Santa Clara and in the Bay area. We have a workforce working in this time zone, but by having another workforce working remotely, we are getting multiple benefits: there is someone that can still deliver the software fixes and run it overnight.

With SPD Ukraine, the whole hiring process is transparent. We are able to participate in it and can tell if someone is good or not.

The last time I counted, I believe there were 15 team members, including different levels of software developers: senior and mid-level software developers, and a requirements engineer. There are 1–2 people more focused on DevOps type of work.

I’d worked with them in the past on some other projects, and when I joined Roche a few years later, we onboarded SPD Ukraine as our vendor.

I believe it started in May 2019, and it is still ongoing.

They need to deliver software that meets a certain quality requirement, and those requirements speak for themselves. We don’t have much regression. Typically, in ongoing software development, when you are building a feature and then another one, the second feature potentially breaks the first one, but we aren’t having those types of issues. That is a really good time and quality metric for software development.

We are driving the team and doing the project management from our side. There have been some things that they delivered on their own, and from that perspective, they’ve done well with project management.

In the past, I worked with vendors from other countries like India. The challenge with that was there was even more of a time difference. Our morning is their night, and I used to run my stand-ups at 9 a.m. in California, which is midnight in India. After half a year of working that way, I saw that they couldn’t keep up with the pace.

As I mentioned, we are part of their hiring process, and if something goes wrong, it isn’t only their responsibility. It is really hard to distinguish what they can do differently because we are sharing the responsibility. We are trying to make a big impact and be more efficient by constantly identifying efficient tools, new libraries, and technologies that can help us move faster, as well as educate people. They are doing a lot of training to keep their people and their skills up to the market expectations of the knowledge of the most recent tools.

I believe you have to know what they want. If you can talk to people and explain what you need, then they can find the right people to get the job done.

I’m the senior director of IT for an investment group.

We needed SPD’s help with AI tool development.

SPD helped us develop an AI tool for elementary school students. Using this tool, end users could copy and paste a paragraph that could be normal, intermediate, or advanced level. The AI would then automatically create multiple choice questions for the user. It would also let users delete or change questions.

I worked with a project manager.

I found SPD through a freelancing website. One of my friends also recommended them, saying they were good developers of AI tools. Our team had asked other companies, but those firms refused to do the project. As a result, we hired SPD.

We spent between $3,000–$4,000.

We started working together in July–October 2021.

We were happy with SPD’s work. My partner and I were fully satisfied with their outputs, and the tool worked as intended. I’d hire them again if we had another project that suited their abilities.

SPD’s project management was perfect. Their manager was proactive, and she was always on time. Whenever we wanted to have a video call, she was available. She also explained everything well. To communicate, we used Upwork.

They did a good job. If we forgot to ask anything, the project manager would remember and would explain everything to us. They also never missed a milestone.

No, there weren’t any. Everything they did was good.

I recommend working with SPD; I wouldn’t think twice about it.

I’m the CTO and CMO of Legal Shelf, a startup company that provides legal document management services in Latin America.

We had an existing product built on PHP, which was old technology, so we needed a development team to rebuild it on a newer technology stack.

We needed to approach this project on a fixed-fee model to have predictability on the budget. Thus, SPD Group first assessed the project, which included reviewing the existing application's functionality and building all the user stories covered in it.

SPD Group’s team has included a project manager, an analyst who acts as product manager to gather requirements, and some designers. Additionally, we’ve worked with a development team that has included an iOS developer, up to three React and React Native frontend developers, a lead architect, and up to four backend developers. As we’re currently in maintenance mode, SPD Group’s core team includes the architect, the analyst, the project manager, a frontend developer, and a backend developer.

I’ve known SPD Group for a while, so this isn’t my first project with them. Originally, I was introduced to them through the CTO of the company I worked with back in 2011. Since then, they’ve been my favorite development firm to work with.

We’ve spent over $250,000 on this project.

I’ve worked with SPD Group on various projects since 2011, and our engagement is ongoing.

Within three months of working with SPD Group, we had a brand new version of our product with the new functionality we needed, so we were able to start selling it. We’ve measured the success of their work with QA and regression testing, and they’ve always delivered quality work.

SPD Group has always delivered on time, even when we’ve had to push the deadlines. We use Shortcut as our project management and ticket management platform, and we use GitHub for the repository. Additionally, we communicate via Slack and Google Meet almost daily.

SPD Group’s commitment to projects is impressive; we’ve never felt like they’re part of a different company. For example, they had team members based in Ukraine who had to flee due to the Russian Invasion. Despite having some of those team members assigned to our project, SPD Group hasn’t missed a single deadline since the invasion started.

I don’t think that SPD Group could improve on anything. On one of my past projects with them, I wished that we had a stronger analyst. However, I can’t say that anymore because they’ve brought excellent resources to the table for this project for very reasonable rates. Nowadays, I can only wish that they weren’t in the middle of an invasion.

Ensure that you have a good in-house development process in place. SPD Group is great at integrating into your process, but they’re not the kind of company that uses their own process. If you have a good process in place, the project will be successful, but if not, they’ll use whatever your process is, and you’ll have to learn and adjust a lot on the go.

I’m the director of Bang Analytics. We provide companies with research data for marketing purposes.

We needed their support in our software development efforts.

SPD Group helped us fulfill the development of one of our software extensions. We kicked off our collaboration with a scoping phase, wherein we relayed our project brief and guidelines to their team. We then worked hand-in-hand with SPD Group to build the platform from scratch.

We worked with a project manager and two developers.

I read their profile on Upwork. Apart from their good reviews, I chose SPD Group because they seemed like a highly skilled team that was capable of delivering our needs.

Our project ran from May–August 2021.

We just reached the deployment stage, so there are no quantitative metrics to share yet. However, I could confirm that SPD Group met our expectations by completing the project within the given timeframe and delivering precise solutions that led to a seamless platform.

We communicated via Slack. SPD Group was on top of their project management game — they were a polite team that remained detail-oriented and proactive throughout our collaboration.

We saw SPD Group's commitment to making solutions that work for us. They took their time to understand the ins and outs of our product, so they were able to deliver tailored results within quick turnaround times.

There was nothing they could've done better or differently.

Come up with a clear project brief — while SPD Group can help you accomplish this, you can save time if you present concise goals and requirements from the start. It also helps to be attentive to their ideas and suggestions