Please describe your company, your role, and the industry you operate in.
As VP of Product Engineering at Silverbrook Digital Ltd I oversee technology spend and delivery across our Energy & Utilities operations out of Belfast, UK. We're a commercially minded business, so every technology decision gets judged on what it actually contributes to the bottom line, not on how elegant it looks on paper.
What specific problem or business challenge led you to hire this company?
Regulation in our Energy & Utilities segment shifted and the compliance deadline came from the regulator, not from us. The scale of the CMS Development changes required justified bringing in a specialist rather than pulling our internal team off the product roadmap to handle it.
What services did the company provide for your project?
The scope ran the full CMS Development 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?
The questions they asked during the briefing stage told us most of what we needed to know. Vendors who ask sharp questions during sales tend to bring that same rigor into delivery, and that held up. The technical proposal had real substance, the team was senior from the start, and the pricing was straightforward.
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?
Genuinely excellent, especially given the time difference between Belfast, UK and the delivery team. Written updates were consistent and specific, anything needing a decision got same-day turnaround, and nothing slipped through the cracks across the whole engagement.
Did the company deliver the project on time and within your expected budget?
On time and inside the approved budget. Their estimating was notably accurate — they'd broken the work down in enough detail during discovery that the forecast held up the whole way through, instead of drifting with every small change. We had exactly one change request, and it was for scope we added ourselves.
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 CMS 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?
The team stayed the same the whole way through. The engineers in the discovery sessions were the same ones who built the system. That continuity matters more than people expect, and you really only notice it when it's missing. Every conversation picked up where the last one left off.
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.