Please describe your company, your role, and the industry you operate in.
Coastline Retail Group is a Information Technology business headquartered in Miami, USA. As Chief Digital Officer I'm responsible for the whole technology agenda — infrastructure, product, and how we pick vendors. Every decision we make on the technology side has to tie back to a clear business case before it gets approved.
What specific problem or business challenge led you to hire this company?
Our IoT Development capability had become the thing slowing everything else down. New feature requests, client asks, internal initiatives — all of it kept queuing up behind a platform that had been stretched way past what it was originally built for. We needed a proper rebuild, not another patch.
What services did the company provide for your project?
Full IoT Development delivery, with particular depth on the integration and data migration pieces — the riskiest parts of the whole program. On top of that, they kept a dedicated QA person on the project throughout and left our operations team with a proper runbook at handover.
Why did you choose this company over other providers you considered?
A peer in the Information Technology space had used them for something similar in IoT Development and recommended them without hesitation. Our own due diligence backed that up. Domain knowledge, IoT Development depth, and a track record of actually delivering — that combination made the decision easy.
How clearly did the company understand your requirements and business goals?
Very well. The discovery phase was more thorough than anything we'd been through with prior vendors. They pushed back on requirements that were vague or contradictory, suggested better alternatives where our own thinking was limited, and produced a spec our internal stakeholders agreed was the clearest version of the product they'd ever seen written down.
How was your overall experience with their communication and project management?
The most structured project management I've dealt with from any outside vendor. Sprint planning was tight, acceptance criteria were specific, and retrospectives actually led to changes rather than just being a box to tick. The backlog and risk register were both treated as live tools, not paperwork. I never once had to chase a status update.
Did the company deliver the project on time and within your expected budget?
Yes to both. I'd quietly built in some contingency given the complexity and the number of integrations involved, and none of it ended up being needed. Delivery landed on the agreed date and the final invoice was within a rounding error of the approved budget — rarer than most people in this industry would admit.
What tangible results or business impact have you seen since the project was completed?
Hard to isolate perfectly given everything else going on in the business, but the numbers we can attribute directly to the IoT Development work are solid: session duration up, conversion up, error rate down, and our NPS for that touchpoint has moved noticeably. Our account managers say it's coming up positively in client conversations now too.
What did you like most about working with this company?
Their willingness to just be direct. If our requirements were unclear, they said so. If our priorities contradicted each other, they explained why. If an approach we'd assumed was right actually had real downsides, they told us before we'd committed to it. That kind of honesty is exactly what I look for in a long-term partner.
Would you recommend this company to others, and would you work with them again?
Yes, no hesitation. I've already referred them twice within my own Information Technology network, both times to people facing IoT Development problems similar to ours. I made those referrals confidently because I know the experience I had was repeatable, not a one-off stroke of luck on our project.