BitBag

Please describe your company and your position there.

I'm the CTO of Planeta Huerto. In charge of the IT team.

For what projects/services did your company hire BitBag, and what were your goals?

The challenge, have a new website more powerful and ready to handle a lot of orders, customers and much rich features.

How did you select BitBag and what were the deciding factors?

They are a team involved in the development of Sylius, the platform selected for our new website channel. Their knowledge about the Sylious e-commerce is very deep and they can perform changes and new features very quick and precise.

Describe the scope of work in detail, including the project steps, key deliverables, and technologies used.

We started with a kick-off meeting in order to collect all our business requierements. After that we started working with de Product Manager and the Development team. We did sprints. Some bugs appeared and Bitbag team told us to include a tester on the team. We have a weekly meeting and we talk almost every day via slack.

How many people from the vendor's team worked with you, and what were their positions?

We work with 3 people from the Bitbag's side.

Can you share any measurable outcomes of the project or general feedback about the deliverables?

We haven't go live yet but what I can say is that we have had to work after them and it has bee quite easy to extend and perform changes.

Describe their project management style, including communication tools and timelines.

We have weekly meetings and we talk via slack every day. Our communication is very good.

What did you find most impressive or unique about this company?

Their work is pretty clear and the results are very good. We have found their work very very professional.

Are there any areas for improvement or something they could have done differently?

Not much improvements I can say. Perhaps, pay more attention or change the wat to do to merges in order to have more stability on the releases.

Introduce your business and what you do there.

I’m the co-owner and COO of Infolox, an online agency. We make digital catalogs and corporate websites for mid-sized businesses—mainly companies that produce technology items and wholesale traders that deal in those items.

What challenge were you trying to address with BitBag?

Our customers’ products are often very complex, and those complexities translate into the catalogs they request from us. We adopted specialized e-commerce software—Sylius—and started looking for an implementation partner.

What was the scope of their involvement?

Our digital catalogs true websites that represent the product details and data, with additional material like CAD data, visualizations, and videos. They also include PDF documents for installation, explanations, compliance, and so on. Then comes the additional layer of e-commerce.

BitBag is now our implementation partner for these e-commerce solutions built on the Sylius enterprise software. We also have frontend developers from their team working for us, as well as Symfony PHP developers. They not only implement e-commerce solutions but also develop extensions for interfaces. It’s implementation, but it’s also technology development.

What is the team composition?

We have six full-time people that BitBag trained in Sylius for us. It’s basically an external team working on our projects.

How did you come to work with BitBag?

We found BitBag through a recommendation from Sylius themselves as a good implementation partner. We started working with them on a project basis at first and came to employ fulltime resources from them.

How much have you invested with them?

We spend around €300,000 per year on their services (approximately $332,000 USD).

What is the status of this engagement?

The collaboration with BitBag started in mid-2017 and is ongoing. 

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

We’re so satisfied with BitBag that we’ve extended our collaboration. BitBag has been actively involved in about half a dozen projects, and they’ve done quite a good job for our customers and us. 

We’ve established new, powerful, and flexible e-commerce solutions with their team. The Sylius software already has a lot of attractive functionalities, and BitBag has added several extensions to it, making it possible for us to sell our content and commerce package successfully.

It’s not always easy to build a team. BitBag has to find the right people, train them, and establish a way to communicate. We’re a German company, and they’re in Poland, so we do a lot of remote work in English. This works well for both parties, and we have several established processes and remote communication means. It’s working well in all regards—not only technology-wise but also in terms of communication and building our team and business

How did BitBag perform from a project management standpoint?

BitBag is streamlined for our processes. We’ve established common ways of planning resources to see how many of them we should use for a specific task. We even have a German-speaking project manager with BitBag who coordinates a lot of things. He can read our specifications, which are often in German. I can’t say whether they’re as good as we are, but their technical expertise is pretty good, as is the commitment level of their managers.

We not only have a common software stack but a common tool stack. We use Slack for remote communication, Gitlab for issue management, and Confluence as a wiki. We also use a German project management tool called Projektron BCS, which offers quite complex and powerful project management, time logging, and planning capabilities. We use it for everything that’s not covered by the other software. BitBag works with it as well—we’ve made user accounts for them.

What did you find most impressive about them?

The business spirit of BitBag’s management stands out to me—they have a real can-do mentality. If we contact them with a problem or task, they will never look at the problem first; they always try to find solutions. They have a very open-minded and positive attitude that we appreciate.

Are there any areas they could improve?

Communication—especially in remote work—is one thing that can always improve. BitBag’s communication at the business and project management level is perfectly fine, but developers aren’t always the best communicators.

Do you have any advice for future clients of theirs?

It’s always important to stay in close contact with the management side. We go directly to them for any ideas, wishes, or problems. We can speak openly with them, and they can solve whatever the issue is.

Introduce your business and what you do there.

I am the founder of a software development company. We provide IT services for our clients, specifically SaaS product development.

What challenge were you trying to address with BitBag?

Specifically, we were looking for someone that could help us with Sylius development for a client assignment of ours.

We had done a couple of implementations in the past, but we were counting on BitBag’s in-depth expertise.

What was the scope of their involvement?

They were involved from the very beginning. When we were defining the functional specifications, they helped out by making estimations and further refining the briefing.

They gave their input on the design, as well as the UI and UX. They also made suggestions for specific Sylius modules. From there on out, they have been implementing basic Sylius installation and as well as custom development based on those specifications.

Sylius, which is based on PHP and Symfony full-stack, is the open-source platform that was used.

What is the team composition?

We had one person dedicated to the backend of the solution, one person who was periodically involved with on the frontend side, and one project manager who kept track of tasks.

How did you come to work with BitBag?

I reached out to them, and I had a good feeling from the very first conversations with them. They are very active in the Sylius community, both in the Slack channels and in public channels. They are also on the Sylius website as one of the main implementors.

How much have you invested in them?

We have invested around €25,000 Euros (approximately $27,558 USD).
What is the status of this engagement?

The project started in July 2019, and the work is ongoing. We are very close to a full wrap up.

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

What stands out to me is their operational methodology and effective communication. They opened up fully and shared their codebase, their Slack account, and all their documents. So, it has been a collaborative relationship rather than a client and supplier relationship. We work together.

How did BitBag perform from a project management standpoint?

They have performed reliably, which is the most important. They also have good knowledge of the project itself. Their project management was more of a “facilitating” approach, and it was just right for what we needed.

What did you find most impressive about them?

They are a young team, so they have the benefits of a motivated young crew. Here and there, you feel the downsides of that, but the pros outweigh the cons in this case.

Are there any areas they could improve?

No. They acted according to the expectations that were set out, and they were always very correct.

Do you have any advice for potential customers?

Potential customers should start from clearly defined specifications and then conform to BitBag’s way of working. 

They have a proven operational model, so ride along and follow their methodologies. This is an added benefit of working with them. You don’t need to ask for the next steps; the next steps come naturally, and you become part of that.

Introduce your business and what you do there.

We’re a retail company in Belarus, with around 14 shops in the country. I’m an Android developer and product owner, and I’ve always worked on our product with development organizations. 

What challenge were you trying to address with BitBag?

We wanted to rework our product delivery website to allow clients to register and create orders. The existing version was hard to scale, so we decided to recreate it from scratch.

What was the scope of their involvement?

BitBag provided full-stack development, taking over the product from another outsourcing company when the product was around 30% complete. BitBag also transferred data from our old platform to the new one, including clients, prices, orders, and more. When we were looking for DevOps resources, BitBag supported our search and provided some contacts to start communication. After we chose a vendor, BitBag helped handle communication between their devs and the DevOps team.

The platform has an admin panel, an order processing panel, and a route generator. It lets us create promotions for customers or add new promotions and information pages. With our admin plug-in, we create different user accounts with different rights to work in the panel (e.g. from regular users to administrators).

Technologies used included Vue.js and Node.js for the frontend and PHP for the backend. They also used GitLab Continuous Integration and Cloud Build. We've completed the implementation, and they're now working on improvements and additional filtering possibilities.

What is the team composition?

We’ve worked with four people from BitBag, including two full-stack developers and one manager. We also worked with a co-founder, with whom we discussed our pricing and scope. He sometimes joined in to help with our project plan.

How did you come to work with BitBag?

We decided to use a Sylius framework for our e-commerce platform. The features it provided were really good for us, and we’d only have to make a few customizations. We looked at their official partners and contacted their founder for a referral. 

They initially recommended a company from Croatia but, after some negotiations, we decided they wouldn’t be the best fit. We asked Sylius’ co-founder about BitBag, which was displayed first on their Partners List. He told us they were likely the most experienced Sylius team. We contacted BitBag, went through a few stages of negotiations and started to work with them.

How much have you invested with them?

We’ve invested between $10,000 and $50,000 with the team. 

What is the status of this engagement?

We started working with BitBag in July 2018, and the platform launched to production in mid-January 2019. We’re continuing to work with them on different stages of the project.

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

I’d rate their work as almost perfect. They let us know when we were deviating from the resource estimates, and they were always open to discussing possible issues that might appear during development.

How did BitBag perform from a project management standpoint?

I’d also rate them as almost perfect in terms of project management. They worked precisely according to the sheet we provided. They spent enough time during a planning phase to correctly estimate the work and break down the tasks. They helped create Scrum jobs and a schedule in Google Cloud. 

What did you find most impressive about them?

I can’t find any objective differentiators between BitBag and other companies, but they have a very good hourly rate, compared to the quality they provide. 

From my practice, I know that an hourly rate should be around $47, and going cheaper will lead to below-average quality. BitBag asked for half of that price for their backend development, and their quality is above that level. Overall, BitBag has highly specialized guys for e-commerce products, so I'd like to recommend them to anyone that’s looking for e-commerce development.

Are there any areas they could improve?

They could improve the structure of their team and how developers’ time is managed. 

For example, it would be better to not switch developers for a project within the same day. In my opinion, it’s better for a developer to work on a project for the first half of a week, and then work on another project in the second half.

Do you have any advice for future clients of theirs?

No, I don’t have any advice.