About Lakeview Labs

LakeviewLabs is one of Chicago's leading web and mobile app development companies. They develop amazing digital products & have a proven track record of creating high-growth startups and profitable companies. Their skilled team can handle all the aspects of mobility so they are rated as the best service provider in Mobile apps development companies in Illinois.

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Mobile App Development UI-UX Design Custom Software Development Enterprise App Modernization E-commerce Development iOS App Development iPhone App Development

Lakeview Labs Reviews

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Custom-built platform that became the backbone of our entire operation

Allison Park / Chief Product Officer - Vertex Media Inc
Verified
Dec 23, 2024

Project summary: Our competitors had been investing in technology for two years and we needed to close a meaningful gap quickly without compromising on the quality of what we shipped.

The thing I appreciate most in retrospect is that they were honest when something was harder than expected. Twice during the project the team came to us proactively to say that a particular component needed more time to do properly and explained why cutting corners would create problems later. We gave them the time. Both decisions were correct. The resulting product is solid and we have had none of the post-launch instability that plagued our last two technology projects.

PROS

Senior engineers on our account throughout the entire project rather than a bait-and-switch to juniors after contract signing, transparent reporting, realistic estimates that proved accurate

CONS

Premium pricing compared to some of the alternatives we evaluated, but the quality of the output and the absence of rework costs made the investment straightforward to justify

5.0
Overall
5.0
Quality
5.0
Schedule
5.0
Cost
5.0
Communication
Project TypeSoftware Development
IndustryAgriculture
Project Cost$10,000 to $49,999
DurationAug 2025 – Jan 2026

Questions & Answers

Please describe your company, your role, and the industry you operate in.
As Chief Product Officer at Vertex Media Inc, I manage a cross-functional technology team serving our Agriculture clients from Los Angeles, USA. We are a commercially focused organisation and every technology decision we make is evaluated against a clear business case. We needed a partner who understood that context, not just the technical brief.
What specific problem or business challenge led you to hire this company?
Our Agriculture regulatory environment had changed and the compliance timeline was non-negotiable. We needed to rebuild specific components of our system to meet the new requirements and our internal team was already fully committed to the core product roadmap. Bringing in a specialist Software Development partner was the only realistic path.
What services did the company provide for your project?
The core engagement was Software Development but expanded to include technical consultancy during the discovery phase, which helped us refine the requirements significantly before development began. They also took responsibility for coordinating with our third-party data providers, which removed a significant coordination burden from our internal team.
Why did you choose this company over other providers you considered?
A direct referral from a peer who had used them for a comparable Software Development engagement in the Agriculture space. That peer's experience had been excellent and their project profile was similar enough to ours that the recommendation carried real weight. Everything we found during our own evaluation reinforced that this was the right decision.
How clearly did the company understand your requirements and business goals?
Better than we did at the start, which sounds like an exaggeration but is genuinely accurate. The discovery workshop they ran surfaced assumptions we had not examined and contradictions in our requirements that would have caused real problems mid-development. The functional specification they produced was the clearest articulation of our product that we had seen written down.
How was your overall experience with their communication and project management?
Professional and efficient. We used a shared project management tool that gave our stakeholders visibility without requiring them to attend every meeting. The project manager had a clear escalation path and used it appropriately. The only time I needed to intervene directly was when I chose to, not because something had been missed.
Did the company deliver the project on time and within your expected budget?
On time and within the agreed budget. They had given us a range estimate at the start, which I had been sceptical of, and they landed within the lower half of that range. Their estimation accuracy came from having broken the work down in genuine detail during discovery rather than giving a rough number and hoping. It showed in every sprint.
What tangible results or business impact have you seen since the project was completed?
Hard to isolate precisely because several factors changed simultaneously, but the data we can attribute directly to the new Software Development platform shows a meaningful improvement in the metrics that matter to our Agriculture business. Our account managers report that the new capability is coming up positively in client conversations, which was one of the strategic objectives we started with.
What did you like most about working with this company?
Their ability to hold the business objective in mind alongside the technical task. I have worked with technically excellent agencies who lost the thread of what we were actually trying to achieve. This team never did. Every architectural decision, every trade-off conversation, every prioritisation discussion was anchored to the outcome we had agreed at the start.
Would you recommend this company to others, and would you work with them again?
Absolutely. I would recommend them with a specific note that the quality of the discovery process is where the value starts. Clients who invest properly in that phase will get the most out of the engagement. We made that investment and the returns are evident in the quality of what was delivered.

CRM integration that connected our marketing automation to our sales process seamlessly

Harry Drummond / IT Programme Director - Northgate Insurance Group
Verified
Nov 27, 2024

Project summary: We had a clear product vision but lacked the engineering capacity internally to execute it within the window our market opportunity required.

The engagement started with a discovery workshop that immediately signalled this team was different. They pushed back on two of our assumptions in the first session with evidence and a better alternative. That kind of intellectual honesty is rare and it set the tone for the whole project. Deliverables were consistently ahead of schedule, code reviews were taken seriously, and the final product is something we are proud to show enterprise clients during due diligence calls.

PROS

Domain knowledge that went beyond generic expertise into our specific industry, willingness to push back constructively, automated test coverage that gave us deployment confidence

CONS

We underestimated the internal resource commitment required on our side during discovery — the team warned us, we did not listen fully, and the first sprint was slower as a result

5.0
Overall
5.0
Quality
5.0
Schedule
5.0
Cost
5.0
Communication
Project TypeCRM Development
IndustrySports & Fitness
Project Cost$500,000+
DurationMay 2025 – Jan 2026

Questions & Answers

Please describe your company, your role, and the industry you operate in.
As IT Programme Director at Northgate Insurance Group, I manage a cross-functional technology team serving our Sports & Fitness clients from Birmingham, UK. We are a commercially focused organisation and every technology decision we make is evaluated against a clear business case. We needed a partner who understood that context, not just the technical brief.
What specific problem or business challenge led you to hire this company?
The immediate trigger was a performance failure during our peak trading period that cost us measurably in both revenue and client trust. The root cause was architectural and our internal team did not have the CRM Development expertise to address it properly. We needed specialists.
What services did the company provide for your project?
Primarily CRM Development, though the scope naturally touched adjacent areas. They handled architecture design, implementation, integration with our existing systems, performance testing under realistic load, and knowledge transfer to our internal team. The breadth of what they covered without requiring us to bring in additional vendors was one of the reasons the project ran efficiently.
Why did you choose this company over other providers you considered?
Honestly, the quality of the questions they asked during the briefing process set them apart. Most vendors listen to the brief and come back with a solution to exactly what you described. This team came back with a solution to what we actually needed, which turned out to be somewhat different. That kind of consultative instinct is what we were looking for.
How clearly did the company understand your requirements and business goals?
Extremely well. They asked detailed questions, challenged vague requirements until they were specific, and proposed sensible defaults for decisions we had not yet made rather than just leaving them open. By the time development started there was no ambiguity in the backlog, which is a rare starting position.
How was your overall experience with their communication and project management?
Outstanding. I have worked with agencies that communicate beautifully during the sales process and go quiet during delivery. This was the opposite — structured, consistent, and genuinely informative throughout. Problems were surfaced early with proposed solutions rather than just problem statements, which made the inevitable mid-project decisions much easier to make.
Did the company deliver the project on time and within your expected budget?
The project landed on the agreed delivery date and within the approved budget. We did add scope during the engagement — two features that became apparent as essential during user testing — and those were quoted, approved, and delivered without affecting the original scope timeline. That kind of clean change management is not something you can take for granted.
What tangible results or business impact have you seen since the project was completed?
The most direct measure is that the problem we hired them to solve no longer exists. Beyond that, the new CRM Development platform has reduced our operational overhead measurably, our team spends less time managing incidents and more time on product development, and we have been able to onboard two new enterprise clients who had previously cited our technical limitations as a barrier.
What did you like most about working with this company?
The continuity of the team. The engineers who scoped the work were the engineers who built it. That sounds like it should be standard practice but in my experience it often is not. The institutional knowledge that comes from that continuity pays dividends at every stage, particularly when you are dealing with a complex Sports & Fitness domain where context takes time to build.
Would you recommend this company to others, and would you work with them again?
I recommend them to anyone who asks and occasionally to people who do not. The combination of CRM Development expertise, Sports & Fitness domain knowledge, and delivery discipline is genuinely difficult to find. We found it here and we intend to keep it.

Custom editorial tooling that fits how our team actually works

Rohan Malhotra / Co-Founder & CTO - Crescendo Tech Pvt Ltd
Verified
Apr 07, 2024

Project summary: Our competitors had been investing in technology for two years and we needed to close a meaningful gap quickly without compromising on the quality of what we shipped.

The engagement started with a discovery workshop that immediately signalled this team was different. They pushed back on two of our assumptions in the first session with evidence and a better alternative. That kind of intellectual honesty is rare and it set the tone for the whole project. Deliverables were consistently ahead of schedule, code reviews were taken seriously, and the final product is something we are proud to show enterprise clients during due diligence calls.

PROS

Engineering quality that our internal team can maintain without calling the vendor, thorough documentation, proactive risk identification throughout the project

CONS

Premium pricing compared to some of the alternatives we evaluated, but the quality of the output and the absence of rework costs made the investment straightforward to justify

5.0
Overall
5.0
Quality
5.0
Schedule
5.0
Cost
5.0
Communication
Project TypeCMS Development
IndustryMining & Metals
Project Cost$500,000+
DurationFeb 2025 – Dec 2025

Questions & Answers

Please describe your company, your role, and the industry you operate in.
Crescendo Tech Pvt Ltd is a Mining & Metals business based in Bangalore, India. As Co-Founder & CTO I am responsible for all technology investment decisions, vendor selection, and ensuring our digital capabilities match our growth ambitions. We operate in a competitive market where the quality of our software directly affects our ability to win and retain clients.
What specific problem or business challenge led you to hire this company?
Our existing CMS Development capability had accumulated years of technical debt that was slowing every new feature to a crawl. Incident frequency was rising, developer confidence was falling, and we knew a rebuild was overdue. We needed a partner with the depth to do it properly rather than apply another layer of patches.
What services did the company provide for your project?
The full CMS Development lifecycle from discovery through to production deployment and hypercare support. This included requirements workshops, solution architecture, sprint-based development, QA and automated testing, deployment to our cloud environment, and a structured handover with documentation. They also provided a brief post-launch period of dedicated support which was genuinely useful.
Why did you choose this company over other providers you considered?
Their portfolio included two projects that were sufficiently close to our own brief in terms of complexity, CMS Development scope, and Mining & Metals context that we felt confident they understood what we were asking. The proposal was technically rigorous, the pricing was transparent, and the proposed team structure gave us senior engineers throughout rather than just for the pitch.
How clearly did the company understand your requirements and business goals?
Thorough and precise. They translated our business language into technical requirements without losing the intent, which is a skill that sounds straightforward but frequently goes wrong. Every user story they wrote was reviewed against the original business objective before it entered the sprint and the acceptance criteria were specific enough to remove subjectivity from QA.
How was your overall experience with their communication and project management?
Professional and efficient. We used a shared project management tool that gave our stakeholders visibility without requiring them to attend every meeting. The project manager had a clear escalation path and used it appropriately. The only time I needed to intervene directly was when I chose to, not because something had been missed.
Did the company deliver the project on time and within your expected budget?
On time and within the agreed budget. They had given us a range estimate at the start, which I had been sceptical of, and they landed within the lower half of that range. Their estimation accuracy came from having broken the work down in genuine detail during discovery rather than giving a rough number and hoping. It showed in every sprint.
What tangible results or business impact have you seen since the project was completed?
Quantitatively: user engagement metrics are up significantly since launch, our support ticket volume has dropped, and we have received unsolicited positive feedback from clients who noticed the improvement. Qualitatively: our internal team is proud of the product we now have, which affects morale and retention in ways that do not show up on a dashboard but matter enormously.
What did you like most about working with this company?
The intellectual honesty. They told us when something we wanted was a bad idea and explained why. They told us when a timeline was tight and gave us options. They did not tell us what we wanted to hear in order to win work or avoid a difficult conversation. In a long engagement that kind of relationship is far more valuable than an agency that just says yes.
Would you recommend this company to others, and would you work with them again?
Absolutely. I would recommend them with a specific note that the quality of the discovery process is where the value starts. Clients who invest properly in that phase will get the most out of the engagement. We made that investment and the returns are evident in the quality of what was delivered.

IT partner who feels genuinely embedded in our organisation

Maryam Al-Zahrani / Head of Innovation - Al-Salam Digital Solutions
Verified
Apr 25, 2023

Project summary: The project had both a hard delivery date tied to a board commitment and a scope that our previous agency had told us was not achievable. We needed someone to prove otherwise.

Project governance was one of the things that impressed me most. We had a dedicated project manager who ran tight fortnightly sprints with clear acceptance criteria, a shared backlog that gave us full visibility at all times, and a change request process that was fair and transparent. Nothing slipped through the cracks, no bill shock at the end, and the final delivery matched the original scope document almost perfectly. In my experience that kind of discipline is genuinely uncommon.

PROS

Domain knowledge that went beyond generic expertise into our specific industry, willingness to push back constructively, automated test coverage that gave us deployment confidence

CONS

Time zone difference required some adjustment to our internal communication habits but the team managed the overlap window efficiently and it never affected momentum

5.0
Overall
5.0
Quality
5.0
Schedule
5.0
Cost
5.0
Communication
Project TypeIT Managed Services
IndustryEnvironmental Services
Project Cost$500,000+
DurationJan 2025 – Jul 2025

Questions & Answers

Please describe your company, your role, and the industry you operate in.
Al-Salam Digital Solutions is a Environmental Services business based in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia. As Head of Innovation I am responsible for all technology investment decisions, vendor selection, and ensuring our digital capabilities match our growth ambitions. We operate in a competitive market where the quality of our software directly affects our ability to win and retain clients.
What specific problem or business challenge led you to hire this company?
We had a product concept validated by market research but no clear path to build it within our budget and timeline constraints. Our Environmental Services competitors were moving quickly and we could not afford to spend eighteen months finding out a generalist agency could not execute the IT Managed Services work our product required.
What services did the company provide for your project?
The full IT Managed Services lifecycle from discovery through to production deployment and hypercare support. This included requirements workshops, solution architecture, sprint-based development, QA and automated testing, deployment to our cloud environment, and a structured handover with documentation. They also provided a brief post-launch period of dedicated support which was genuinely useful.
Why did you choose this company over other providers you considered?
Honestly, the quality of the questions they asked during the briefing process set them apart. Most vendors listen to the brief and come back with a solution to exactly what you described. This team came back with a solution to what we actually needed, which turned out to be somewhat different. That kind of consultative instinct is what we were looking for.
How clearly did the company understand your requirements and business goals?
Better than we did at the start, which sounds like an exaggeration but is genuinely accurate. The discovery workshop they ran surfaced assumptions we had not examined and contradictions in our requirements that would have caused real problems mid-development. The functional specification they produced was the clearest articulation of our product that we had seen written down.
How was your overall experience with their communication and project management?
Outstanding. I have worked with agencies that communicate beautifully during the sales process and go quiet during delivery. This was the opposite — structured, consistent, and genuinely informative throughout. Problems were surfaced early with proposed solutions rather than just problem statements, which made the inevitable mid-project decisions much easier to make.
Did the company deliver the project on time and within your expected budget?
Yes. I will note that the original timeline was aggressive and I had privately expected a slip. They managed to hold it by making smart sequencing decisions early on that I only fully understood in retrospect. The budget discipline was equally good — we received a single change request for scope we had introduced ourselves and it was priced fairly.
What tangible results or business impact have you seen since the project was completed?
The most direct measure is that the problem we hired them to solve no longer exists. Beyond that, the new IT Managed Services platform has reduced our operational overhead measurably, our team spends less time managing incidents and more time on product development, and we have been able to onboard two new enterprise clients who had previously cited our technical limitations as a barrier.
What did you like most about working with this company?
Their ability to hold the business objective in mind alongside the technical task. I have worked with technically excellent agencies who lost the thread of what we were actually trying to achieve. This team never did. Every architectural decision, every trade-off conversation, every prioritisation discussion was anchored to the outcome we had agreed at the start.
Would you recommend this company to others, and would you work with them again?
I recommend them to anyone who asks and occasionally to people who do not. The combination of IT Managed Services expertise, Environmental Services domain knowledge, and delivery discipline is genuinely difficult to find. We found it here and we intend to keep it.

Company Info

Founded 2014
Employees 2 - 9
Hourly Rate $100 - $149
Client Rating 5.0/5 (4 reviews)

Rating Breakdown

Quality
5.0
Schedule
5.0
Cost
5.0
Communication
5.0