Service: Nearshore

Challenge

Our client is a Chicago-based education technology (edtech) company that creates K-12 writing software and curriculum to help students become strong critical thinkers. Highlighted as a “game-changing educational software” by Bill Gates, controlled studies also show that its product helps students with reading and writing growth. The company teaches critical thinking through argumentative writing via its personalized literacy platform for English, language arts, science, social studies, and math.

This edtech startup had a unique opportunity to distribute its products to several schools. The company had a small and highly skilled engineering team, but did not have the internal resources to scale up the product in time to serve this high volume of school customers. If the company missed the opportunity to ready its products for this opportunity, a competitor would win the work.

As an early-stage company, they needed a cost-effective solution as they sought to build an intuitive SaaS platform for teachers, students, and principals.

The Solution

We were able to meet this client’s needs for scale, speed, and cost-effectiveness by engaging our nearshore engineering team. Based in Argentina, we were able to match working hours, and integrate quickly with the internal team. We provided an autonomous team that included Ember.js, React.js, and Ruby on Rails developers, a business analyst, and QA resources to build an evolved teacher lesson library and grading experience. Our team provided end-to-end service and guidance to the client by developing the product roadmap, supplying resources, and performing QA.

Results

Our client scaled-up quickly, moving from two developers to three parallel teams in just four months. They reduced time-to-market by 225% thanks to streamlined engineering and collaboration capabilities. They saved 40% on resource costs over a three-year period, compared to estimated costs to staff the team internally from Chicago.