Please describe your company, your role, and the industry you operate in.
I run technology for Aurora Systems Inc, a growth-stage Government & Public Sector company based in Ottawa, Canada. My role as CTO covers product engineering, platform operations, and our vendor relationships. We'd hit a point where our internal capacity just couldn't keep pace with what the roadmap demanded.
What specific problem or business challenge led you to hire this company?
Our Digital Marketing 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?
The scope ran the full Digital Marketing lifecycle — discovery, requirements, architecture, development across roughly a dozen sprints, integration testing, performance validation, deployment, and a four-week hypercare window afterward. They also handed over full documentation and ran a knowledge transfer session for our internal team.
Why did you choose this company over other providers you considered?
We were coming off a failed engagement and went into vendor selection this time with a lot more scrutiny. We asked pointed questions about how they handle scope changes, how they estimate, how they communicate bad news. The answers were specific and consistent across everyone we spoke to on their team, which gave us confidence it wasn't a rehearsed pitch.
How clearly did the company understand your requirements and business goals?
Better than we understood them ourselves, honestly. The workshops they ran surfaced assumptions we'd never questioned and exposed a few requirements that flatly contradicted each other. Sorting that out before development started saved us from what would have been serious rework later.
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 Digital Marketing 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?
What they did after launch. A lot of vendors treat go-live as the finish line. This team treated it as the start of a different phase — the hypercare period was substantial, the documentation held up in practice, and they checked back in at the thirty and ninety day marks to go over production metrics with us unprompted.
Would you recommend this company to others, and would you work with them again?
Absolutely, with one caveat worth mentioning: the value really starts in discovery, so clients who take that phase seriously will get the most out of it. We put real effort in upfront and it clearly paid off in what got delivered.