Hoasen Innovation Lab Reviews

Publishing workflow that took our time-to-live from days to under an hour

Jia Hui Tan / VP of Engineering - RedDot Technologies Pte Ltd

Verified
May 14, 2026

Project summary: Our internal product thinking was strong but our execution capability in this specific technology domain was limited. We needed depth, not generalism.

Six months after go-live our platform is processing three times the transaction volume we specified in the original brief. The architecture choices made during discovery accommodated that growth without remediation work. That is the difference between a team that designs for what you tell them and a team that designs for what you are likely to need. We are in conversation about a Phase 2 engagement and I expect to be using this partnership for several years.

PROS

Deep domain knowledge that reduced the discovery overhead significantly, proactive risk identification before issues became incidents, delivery cadence that our stakeholders found reassuring

CONS

Time zone coordination required some deliberate overlap management from both sides in the first couple of sprints, after which we had an efficient async rhythm that worked for the whole project

4.5

Overall

4.5

Quality

4.5

Schedule

4.5

Cost

5.0

Communication

Project TypeCMS Development

IndustrySports & Fitness

Project Cost$10,000 to $49,999

DurationDec 2025 – Mar 2026

Questions & Answers

Please describe your company, your role, and the industry you operate in.

As VP of Engineering at RedDot Technologies Pte Ltd I oversee technology investment and delivery across our Sports & Fitness operations in Singapore. We are a commercially focused business and our technology choices are always evaluated in terms of their direct contribution to business outcomes rather than technical elegance alone.

What specific problem or business challenge led you to hire this company?

We had a defined product vision for our next phase of growth in the Sports & Fitness market but lacked the engineering depth internally to execute it. The CMS Development requirements in particular required specialist experience that we could not realistically recruit for on the timeline our business plan required.

What services did the company provide for your project?

Primarily CMS Development, with adjacent work in solution architecture and quality assurance. They were responsible for the full build from requirements through to go-live, including integration with four existing systems in our technology landscape. The breadth they covered without requiring additional vendors was commercially and logistically valuable.

Why did you choose this company over other providers you considered?

We had a failed engagement behind us and were more rigorous in our selection process as a result. We asked detailed questions about how they managed scope change, how they handled estimation, and how they communicated problems. The answers were specific, evidenced, and consistent across the team members we spoke to. That gave us confidence that the process was real rather than rehearsed.

How clearly did the company understand your requirements and business goals?

Extremely well, in part because they had relevant Sports & Fitness experience that reduced the context-setting overhead significantly. They understood the domain vocabulary, asked the right questions, and translated business requirements into technical specifications with a fidelity that meant the development phase had very few clarification cycles.

How was your overall experience with their communication and project management?

Communication was proactive, timely, and appropriately calibrated. Technical updates for the engineering audience, executive summaries for the steering group, risk flags with proposed mitigations rather than just problem statements. The fortnightly sprint reviews gave our stakeholders visibility without requiring them to attend every working session.

Did the company deliver the project on time and within your expected budget?

The project landed on time. The budget was managed within the agreed ceiling, which included one client-driven scope addition that was quoted fairly and handled without affecting the original delivery stream. The discipline around budget transparency throughout meant there was no surprise at invoice stage.

What tangible results or business impact have you seen since the project was completed?

We went live four months ago. User adoption exceeded the target we had set by 23 percent in the first month. Support ticket volume has dropped measurably. The features we had deferred because the previous architecture made them prohibitively expensive to build are now in development. The platform they built has opened our roadmap.

What did you like most about working with this company?

The willingness to be direct. When our requirements were unclear they said so. When our priorities were contradictory they explained why. When a technical approach we had assumed was the right one turned out to have significant downsides, they told us before we had committed to it. That kind of intellectual honesty is what I look for in a long-term technology partner.

Would you recommend this company to others, and would you work with them again?

Unreservedly. We are in active scoping conversations for a second engagement and I expect this to develop into a multi-year partnership. For any organisation in the Sports & Fitness sector looking for CMS Development expertise combined with genuine delivery discipline, I would put this team at the top of the evaluation list.

VR training that cut certification time and is genuinely preferred by our trainees

Dominic Fairfax / Head of Digital Transformation - Arcadian Consulting Ltd

Verified
May 06, 2026

Project summary: Cross-agency data sharing had been blocked by incompatible systems for four years. A secure integration platform was the prerequisite for every transformation initiative in our roadmap.

Six months after go-live our platform is processing three times the transaction volume we specified in the original brief. The architecture choices made during discovery accommodated that growth without remediation work. That is the difference between a team that designs for what you tell them and a team that designs for what you are likely to need. We are in conversation about a Phase 2 engagement and I expect to be using this partnership for several years.

PROS

Architectural decisions designed for longevity rather than just the current brief, thorough automated test coverage, post-launch stability that validated every technical choice made during discovery

CONS

Time zone coordination required some deliberate overlap management from both sides in the first couple of sprints, after which we had an efficient async rhythm that worked for the whole project

5.0

Overall

5.0

Quality

4.5

Schedule

5.0

Cost

5.0

Communication

Project TypeAR/VR Development

IndustryGovernment & Public Sector

Project Cost$50,000 to $149,999

DurationDec 2025 – Apr 2026

Questions & Answers

Please describe your company, your role, and the industry you operate in.

Arcadian Consulting Ltd is an established Government & Public Sector organisation headquartered in London, UK. My role as Head of Digital Transformation covers both strategic planning and operational technology delivery. We maintain high standards for our vendors because our clients hold us to high standards — a bar we expect our partners to meet.

What specific problem or business challenge led you to hire this company?

We had a defined product vision for our next phase of growth in the Government & Public Sector market but lacked the engineering depth internally to execute it. The AR/VR Development requirements in particular required specialist experience that we could not realistically recruit for on the timeline our business plan required.

What services did the company provide for your project?

Primarily AR/VR Development, with adjacent work in solution architecture and quality assurance. They were responsible for the full build from requirements through to go-live, including integration with four existing systems in our technology landscape. The breadth they covered without requiring additional vendors was commercially and logistically valuable.

Why did you choose this company over other providers you considered?

The quality of the questions they asked during the briefing process was the first indicator. Vendors who ask precise questions in the sales phase tend to apply the same rigour during delivery. That hypothesis proved accurate. The technical proposal was substantive, the team structure was senior throughout, and the pricing was transparent.

How clearly did the company understand your requirements and business goals?

Extremely well, in part because they had relevant Government & Public Sector experience that reduced the context-setting overhead significantly. They understood the domain vocabulary, asked the right questions, and translated business requirements into technical specifications with a fidelity that meant the development phase had very few clarification cycles.

How was your overall experience with their communication and project management?

Professional and efficient. The project manager maintained a clear view of the critical path at all times and communicated changes to it transparently. The one significant scope adjustment we made mid-project was handled through a clean change request process — fairly priced, clearly documented, and absorbed without disrupting the overall timeline.

Did the company deliver the project on time and within your expected budget?

Yes to both. There was a single sprint where a dependency on a third-party API introduced a one-week delay. The team identified it three weeks in advance, presented two mitigation options, and we agreed on an approach that recovered the schedule within the same sprint cycle. That level of foresight is what separates good project management from reactive problem management.

What tangible results or business impact have you seen since the project was completed?

We went live four months ago. User adoption exceeded the target we had set by 23 percent in the first month. Support ticket volume has dropped measurably. The features we had deferred because the previous architecture made them prohibitively expensive to build are now in development. The platform they built has opened our roadmap.

What did you like most about working with this company?

Their instinct for keeping the business objective visible throughout technical decision-making. I have worked with technically excellent teams who lose the strategic thread as complexity increases. This team maintained a clear connection between every architectural choice and the outcome we had agreed to achieve. That orientation made the trade-off conversations significantly easier.

Would you recommend this company to others, and would you work with them again?

Unreservedly. We are in active scoping conversations for a second engagement and I expect this to develop into a multi-year partnership. For any organisation in the Government & Public Sector sector looking for AR/VR Development expertise combined with genuine delivery discipline, I would put this team at the top of the evaluation list.

Technically rigorous, commercially grounded, and a genuine pleasure to work with

Tobias Lindemann / Leiter Digitalisierung - Lindemann Industrie GmbH

Verified
Apr 28, 2026

Project summary: Customer expectations had reset and our conversion funnel data showed precisely where we were losing them. We needed a commerce platform capable of delivering the experience our competitors already had.

The thing that retrospectively seems most significant is how little drama there was. Complex technology projects tend to accumulate incidents, escalations, and tense conversations. This one did not. Problems were surfaced before they became incidents. Scope changes were handled with process rather than conflict. Risks were managed rather than avoided. That level of maturity is rare in my experience and it made the delivery feel almost effortless from our side, which I know it was not from theirs.

PROS

Commercially transparent throughout — no hidden assumptions, no bill shock at the end, change requests that were fair and clearly explained rather than used as a margin-recovery mechanism

CONS

The engagement was priced at the quality level rather than the budget level. We evaluated the alternatives and concluded that the delta was a reasonable premium for the reduction in delivery risk

4.5

Overall

4.0

Quality

5.0

Schedule

4.5

Cost

4.5

Communication

Project TypeEmbedded Systems Development

IndustryRetail & E-commerce

Project Cost$50,000 to $149,999

DurationSep 2025 – Jan 2026

Questions & Answers

Please describe your company, your role, and the industry you operate in.

Lindemann Industrie GmbH operates in the Retail & E-commerce sector with headquarters in Berlin, Germany. In my role as Leiter Digitalisierung I am accountable for the full technology agenda — infrastructure, product, and vendor relationships. We are a commercially driven organisation and every technology decision is evaluated against a clear business case before it is approved.

What specific problem or business challenge led you to hire this company?

The immediate problem was that our Embedded Systems Development capability had become the bottleneck limiting our ability to grow. Every feature request, every new client requirement, every internal initiative was delayed by a platform that had been extended beyond its original design. We needed a rebuild, not a patch.

What services did the company provide for your project?

The scope covered the full Embedded Systems Development lifecycle: discovery and requirements definition, solution architecture, iterative development across twelve sprints, integration testing, performance validation, production deployment, and a structured four-week hypercare period. They also provided system documentation and a knowledge transfer programme for our internal team.

Why did you choose this company over other providers you considered?

We ran a structured shortlisting process across five vendors. The technical evaluation eliminated two immediately. Of the remaining three, this team's proposal was differentiated by the specificity of their Embedded Systems Development approach and the evidence base they provided — reference projects in Retail & E-commerce contexts, not generic case studies. The reference calls confirmed a track record that the proposal had described accurately.

How clearly did the company understand your requirements and business goals?

Better than we managed ourselves going in. The workshops they facilitated surfaced assumptions we had not examined and exposed three requirements that were in direct conflict with each other. Resolving those before development began saved us what would certainly have been significant rework later in the project.

How was your overall experience with their communication and project management?

Communication was proactive, timely, and appropriately calibrated. Technical updates for the engineering audience, executive summaries for the steering group, risk flags with proposed mitigations rather than just problem statements. The fortnightly sprint reviews gave our stakeholders visibility without requiring them to attend every working session.

Did the company deliver the project on time and within your expected budget?

On time and within the approved budget. The estimation accuracy was notable — they had broken the work down in sufficient detail during discovery that their forecast proved reliable throughout, rather than being a number that shifted with every change in scope. We received one change request and it was for scope we had introduced ourselves.

What tangible results or business impact have you seen since the project was completed?

Quantifying the impact precisely is complicated by other variables in our business, but the metrics we can attribute directly to the Embedded Systems Development work are meaningful: session duration up, conversion rate up, error rate down, and our NPS for the digital touchpoint has improved by eleven points. Our account managers report that the new capability is coming up positively in client conversations.

What did you like most about working with this company?

The willingness to be direct. When our requirements were unclear they said so. When our priorities were contradictory they explained why. When a technical approach we had assumed was the right one turned out to have significant downsides, they told us before we had committed to it. That kind of intellectual honesty is what I look for in a long-term technology partner.

Would you recommend this company to others, and would you work with them again?

Yes, without reservation. I have already made two direct referrals within my Retail & E-commerce network — in both cases to peers facing Embedded Systems Development challenges similar to ours. I gave those referrals with confidence because I knew the experience I described was reproducible, not the result of exceptional circumstances on our engagement.

Monetisation system integrated in a way that players accepted rather than resented

Fatima Al-Suwaidi / Head of Digital Strategy - Gulf FinTech Holdings

Verified
Feb 21, 2026

Project summary: As a technology business ourselves we apply the same scrutiny to our vendor selection that our clients apply to us. We needed a delivery partner who could meet a standard we would be comfortable being measured against.

The thing that retrospectively seems most significant is how little drama there was. Complex technology projects tend to accumulate incidents, escalations, and tense conversations. This one did not. Problems were surfaced before they became incidents. Scope changes were handled with process rather than conflict. Risks were managed rather than avoided. That level of maturity is rare in my experience and it made the delivery feel almost effortless from our side, which I know it was not from theirs.

PROS

Commercially transparent throughout — no hidden assumptions, no bill shock at the end, change requests that were fair and clearly explained rather than used as a margin-recovery mechanism

CONS

Their discovery process is more rigorous than we were accustomed to and required more preparation from our side than we had initially allocated — but the quality of what followed justified every hour of it

4.5

Overall

4.0

Quality

5.0

Schedule

4.5

Cost

4.0

Communication

Project TypeGame Development

IndustryInformation Technology

Project Cost$500,000+

DurationSep 2025 – Jan 2026

Questions & Answers

Please describe your company, your role, and the industry you operate in.

Gulf FinTech Holdings is an established Information Technology organisation headquartered in Abu Dhabi, UAE. My role as Head of Digital Strategy covers both strategic planning and operational technology delivery. We maintain high standards for our vendors because our clients hold us to high standards — a bar we expect our partners to meet.

What specific problem or business challenge led you to hire this company?

Regulatory requirements in our Information Technology segment had changed and the compliance timeline was set by our regulator, not by us. The Game Development changes required were significant enough to justify engaging a specialist partner rather than diverting our internal team from the product roadmap.

What services did the company provide for your project?

End-to-end Game Development delivery with particular depth in the integration and data migration components, which were the highest-risk elements of the programme. They supplemented this with a dedicated QA resource throughout development and a documented runbook for our operations team at handover.

Why did you choose this company over other providers you considered?

We ran a structured shortlisting process across five vendors. The technical evaluation eliminated two immediately. Of the remaining three, this team's proposal was differentiated by the specificity of their Game Development approach and the evidence base they provided — reference projects in Information Technology contexts, not generic case studies. The reference calls confirmed a track record that the proposal had described accurately.

How clearly did the company understand your requirements and business goals?

Thoroughly and precisely. The requirements document they produced was detailed enough that our QA team used it directly to write acceptance criteria. Every user story had a defined business objective attached. Nothing was left to interpretation. That discipline in the requirements phase paid dividends throughout development and testing.

How was your overall experience with their communication and project management?

The project management framework was the most structured I have experienced with an external vendor. Sprint planning was tight, acceptance criteria were specific, retrospectives were honest and acted on. The project manager treated the shared backlog as a live document and the risk register as an operational tool rather than a compliance artefact. I never had to ask for a status update.

Did the company deliver the project on time and within your expected budget?

On time and within the approved budget. The estimation accuracy was notable — they had broken the work down in sufficient detail during discovery that their forecast proved reliable throughout, rather than being a number that shifted with every change in scope. We received one change request and it was for scope we had introduced ourselves.

What tangible results or business impact have you seen since the project was completed?

The ROI case we presented to our board was conservative by design. Current performance against the financial model suggests we will hit the projected payback point in under twelve months against an eighteen-month target. The operational efficiency gains in particular have exceeded the model, in part because the quality of the data the new platform generates supports decisions that the previous system could not.

What did you like most about working with this company?

The post-launch behaviour. Some vendors consider go-live to be the end of their professional obligation. This team treated it as the transition to a different kind of engagement. The hypercare period was substantive, the documentation was thorough and genuinely useful, and they checked in proactively at the thirty-day and ninety-day marks to review production metrics with us.

Would you recommend this company to others, and would you work with them again?

Yes. I would add the context that this is not the cheapest option in the market and they are selective about the engagements they take on. If your primary criterion is price, there are alternatives. If you want a technology partner who can be trusted with a complex Game Development programme in the Information Technology space and will deliver against a serious brief, this is the team.

Immersive experience that generated more media coverage than anything we had shipped before

Siobhan Gallagher / Chief Technology Officer - Northumbria FinTech Ltd

Verified
Feb 13, 2026

Project summary: An international expansion required multi-currency, multi-language, and multi-warehouse capabilities that our existing platform could not support without a fundamental re-architecture.

We had worked with three agencies before this engagement. The comparison is not flattering to the others. What distinguished this team was a systematic approach to understanding the problem before proposing a solution — something that sounds obvious and is practiced far less often than it should be. The delivery phase ran to schedule, the codebase is clean enough that our internal engineers made positive comments during handover review, and we have not logged a critical incident in five months of live operation. We intend to use them for our next phase of work.

PROS

Commercially transparent throughout — no hidden assumptions, no bill shock at the end, change requests that were fair and clearly explained rather than used as a margin-recovery mechanism

CONS

Their insistence on a detailed functional specification before development began felt like friction at the time. In retrospect, it was the reason the development phase ran without the ambiguity that has derailed similar projects for us previously

5.0

Overall

5.0

Quality

5.0

Schedule

5.0

Cost

5.0

Communication

Project TypeAR/VR Development

IndustryRetail & E-commerce

Project CostLess than $10,000

DurationJun 2025 – Dec 2025

Questions & Answers

Please describe your company, your role, and the industry you operate in.

I lead technology at Northumbria FinTech Ltd, a growth-stage Retail & E-commerce business based in Edinburgh, UK. As Chief Technology Officer my remit spans product engineering, platform operations, and strategic vendor partnerships. We had reached an inflection point where our internal capacity was not sufficient to execute our roadmap at the pace our market required.

What specific problem or business challenge led you to hire this company?

The immediate problem was that our AR/VR Development capability had become the bottleneck limiting our ability to grow. Every feature request, every new client requirement, every internal initiative was delayed by a platform that had been extended beyond its original design. We needed a rebuild, not a patch.

What services did the company provide for your project?

End-to-end AR/VR Development delivery with particular depth in the integration and data migration components, which were the highest-risk elements of the programme. They supplemented this with a dedicated QA resource throughout development and a documented runbook for our operations team at handover.