The Design Group Reviews

About The Design Group

Their goal is to efficiently match their client's demands and wants with their services so that their clients can achieve maximum exposure, which in turn maximizes their chances of success. They believe their success comes from their passion for what they do and strive to illustrate that in each design or solution they create. It connects your online presence with your market.

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Security audit that found issues we did not know existed and fixed every one

Jisoo Kwon / CTO - HanRiver Tech Co Ltd

Verified
Mar 07, 2025

Project summary: The shift to EVs required us to build a connected vehicle data platform capable of handling telemetry from a growing fleet while supporting over-the-air software updates.

Our previous agency had given us a platform that worked well enough to demo and fell apart under real load. This team came in, diagnosed the root causes accurately, and rebuilt the critical components without disrupting the live service. The performance improvements were immediate and measurable — page load times dropped by 60 percent, error rates dropped to near zero, and our support team has far fewer incidents to deal with. The contrast with our previous experience could not have been sharper.

PROS

Architectural decisions that will serve us for years rather than just solving the immediate problem, knowledge transfer that left our team genuinely capable, no scope creep at all

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 TypeCybersecurity

IndustryAutomotive

Project Cost$50,000 to $149,999

DurationDec 2024 – Jan 2025

Questions & Answers

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

HanRiver Tech Co Ltd operates across the Automotive sector with offices in Seoul, South Korea. In my capacity as CTO I oversee both the strategic and operational technology agenda. We are a growth-stage business that needed a development partner capable of scaling with us rather than constraining us.

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 Cybersecurity expertise to address it properly. We needed specialists.

What services did the company provide for your project?

The core engagement was Cybersecurity 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?

We evaluated four vendors in total. Two were eliminated after the technical assessment stage because their proposed architectures showed a surface-level understanding of what we needed. This team's proposal demonstrated genuine depth in Cybersecurity and specific knowledge of the Automotive sector that the others could not match. The reference calls confirmed a consistent pattern of delivery.

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?

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 Cybersecurity 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 quality of the written communication. This matters more than most clients articulate. Clear, concise, technically accurate updates that our non-technical stakeholders could read and understand. Proposals and change requests that made the decision obvious rather than obscuring it in jargon. That communication quality reduced our internal coordination overhead significantly.

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

Yes, without qualification. I have already made two direct referrals to peers in the Automotive sector who were facing similar Cybersecurity challenges. In both cases I gave the recommendation specifically because I was confident the experience would match what I described — which is a level of confidence I do not extend lightly.

CMS migration completed without losing a single page of SEO equity

Karolina Dabrowska / CTO - Krakow Tech Studio

Verified
Mar 31, 2024

Project summary: We needed to connect our factory floor systems to our ERP to give operations management real-time visibility into production status, waste, and throughput.

Our previous agency had given us a platform that worked well enough to demo and fell apart under real load. This team came in, diagnosed the root causes accurately, and rebuilt the critical components without disrupting the live service. The performance improvements were immediate and measurable — page load times dropped by 60 percent, error rates dropped to near zero, and our support team has far fewer incidents to deal with. The contrast with our previous experience could not have been sharper.

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

The volume of quality documentation they produced was genuinely impressive but also meant our team needed dedicated time to review it properly — a minor process point, not a complaint

5.0

Overall

5.0

Quality

5.0

Schedule

5.0

Cost

5.0

Communication

Project TypeCMS Development

IndustryManufacturing

Project Cost$10,000 to $49,999

DurationMar 2025 – Apr 2026

Questions & Answers

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

As CTO at Krakow Tech Studio, I manage a cross-functional technology team serving our Manufacturing clients from Krakow, Poland. 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 CMS Development expertise to address it properly. We needed specialists.

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?

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?

The project management was the best I have experienced in a vendor relationship. We had fortnightly sprint reviews with structured agendas, a shared backlog that we could inspect at any point, a risk register that was actively maintained rather than created at kickoff and never opened again, and a project manager who treated our time as something worth protecting. Communication was proactive, not reactive.

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?

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?

Unreservedly. We are in active conversation about the next phase of work and I expect this to become a multi-year partnership. For any organisation in the Manufacturing space looking for a CMS Development partner who combines technical rigour with genuine commercial awareness, I would put this team at the top of the shortlist.

Predictive analytics that gave us an edge we had never had before

Megan Foster / Head of Technology - Clearwater Logistics

Verified
Apr 27, 2022

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.

I have worked with development agencies on four continents over the past fifteen years and this team sits comfortably in the top tier. What separated them was not just technical skill, which was genuinely impressive, but their instinct for asking the right business questions before reaching for a technical answer. The project ran to schedule, the architecture is clean and well-documented, and the handover was thorough. Six months after go-live we have not raised a single critical support ticket. That speaks for itself.

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

The volume of quality documentation they produced was genuinely impressive but also meant our team needed dedicated time to review it properly — a minor process point, not a complaint

5.0

Overall

5.0

Quality

5.0

Schedule

5.0

Cost

5.0

Communication

Project TypeAI & Machine Learning

IndustryEvents & Event Management

Project Cost$50,000 to $149,999

DurationJun 2025 – Dec 2025

Questions & Answers

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

I lead technology at Clearwater Logistics, a mid-sized organisation in the Events & Event Management sector headquartered in Dallas, USA. My remit as Head of Technology covers everything from infrastructure to product development. We had reached a point where our internal engineering capacity was not sufficient to execute our roadmap without an experienced external partner.

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 Events & Event Management competitors were moving quickly and we could not afford to spend eighteen months finding out a generalist agency could not execute the AI & Machine Learning work our product required.

What services did the company provide for your project?

The full AI & Machine Learning 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?

Price was a factor but not the deciding one. They were mid-range in our evaluation. What tipped it was the combination of their technical depth in AI & Machine Learning, the seniority of the team they proposed to assign to our account, and the clarity of their project governance model. We had been burned by an agency that overpromised before and we needed to see evidence of process maturity.

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

The requirements understanding was solid from early on, aided by the fact that they had prior experience in the Events & Event Management sector and did not need us to explain domain context that a less experienced team would have required. That background knowledge shortened the discovery phase meaningfully and reduced the volume of clarification questions during sprints.

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

Communication was handled primarily asynchronously given the time zone difference between Dallas, USA and the team's base, but it was managed so well that the gap rarely felt like a constraint. Written updates were clear and timely, escalations were handled promptly, and we never had to chase for a status update. The cadence was exactly right — enough to feel informed, not so much that it created overhead.

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?

Hard to isolate precisely because several factors changed simultaneously, but the data we can attribute directly to the new AI & Machine Learning platform shows a meaningful improvement in the metrics that matter to our Events & Event Management 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?

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?

Yes. The referral I would give comes with context: they are not the cheapest option and they are not the fastest to schedule. If you are optimising purely on price or looking for someone to start tomorrow, there are other choices. If you want the work done properly and a partner you can trust with a complex, high-stakes AI & Machine Learning engagement, this team is the answer.

The Design Group

About The Design Group

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