The Manahan Group Reviews

About The Manahan Group

The Manahan Group is an award-winning full-service web development company. The agency serves national, regional and local clients including those in health care, tourism, financial services, law, transportation, energy, and the non-profit sector. Their award-winning team is carefully crafted, offering expertise in everything from social media to event planning to media buying and everything in-between. They believe doing good work for their clients is just as important as doing good in their community.

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Execution that matched the sales pitch — which is rarer than it should be

Brandon Hayes / VP of Engineering - Apex Digital Partners

Verified
Sep 27, 2025

Project summary: Several previous vendor relationships had left us cautious. We needed a partner who would be honest about complexity upfront rather than discovering it mid-project.

The technical quality of the work is the easiest thing to praise, but what I want to highlight is the communication culture on this team. Every question got a same-day response. Every risk got flagged before it became an issue. When we needed to change direction mid-project — a business decision on our side — they absorbed the change professionally, requoted fairly, and kept momentum going. That flexibility is something you cannot assess in a proposal and it turned out to be one of the most valuable things about working with them.

PROS

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

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 TypeEmbedded Systems Development

IndustryAerospace & Defense

Project Cost$500,000+

DurationMar 2025 – Oct 2025

Questions & Answers

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

I lead technology at Apex Digital Partners, a mid-sized organisation in the Aerospace & Defense sector headquartered in San Francisco, USA. My remit as VP of Engineering 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?

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 Embedded Systems Development expertise to address it properly. We needed specialists.

What services did the company provide for your project?

Primarily Embedded Systems 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?

Their portfolio included two projects that were sufficiently close to our own brief in terms of complexity, Embedded Systems Development scope, and Aerospace & Defense 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?

The requirements understanding was solid from early on, aided by the fact that they had prior experience in the Aerospace & Defense 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?

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?

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 Embedded Systems Development platform shows a meaningful improvement in the metrics that matter to our Aerospace & Defense 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?

Yes, without qualification. I have already made two direct referrals to peers in the Aerospace & Defense sector who were facing similar Embedded Systems Development 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.

Monetisation system integrated cleanly without disrupting the player experience

Arjun Kapoor / Head of Product - Skyline Retail Ventures

Verified
Nov 02, 2022

Project summary: Renewable energy forecasting required a machine learning layer that our internal team had the domain knowledge for but not the engineering capacity to build and productionise.

Twelve weeks from kickoff to live production deployment for a project of this complexity. I would not have believed that was achievable if I had not watched them do it. The velocity came from genuine engineering discipline — clear requirements, short feedback loops, automated testing, and a team that communicated internally without the overhead that slows most agencies down. The product has been live for four months with no critical bugs and one minor patch. We are already in scoping conversations for phase two.

PROS

Collaborative working style that made them feel like an extension of our team, excellent written communication for our async timezone relationship, clean and readable codebase

CONS

Their calendar books up quickly which made scheduling the initial kickoff slightly challenging — a good problem for them to have and not one that affected our delivery

5.0

Overall

5.0

Quality

5.0

Schedule

5.0

Cost

5.0

Communication

Project TypeGame Development

IndustryEnergy & Utilities

Project Cost$150,000 to $499,999

DurationMar 2025 – Apr 2026

Questions & Answers

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

I lead technology at Skyline Retail Ventures, a mid-sized organisation in the Energy & Utilities sector headquartered in Mumbai, India. My remit as Head of Product 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?

Our Energy & Utilities 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 Game Development partner was the only realistic path.

What services did the company provide for your project?

The core engagement was Game 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?

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?

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 Game Development platform shows a meaningful improvement in the metrics that matter to our Energy & Utilities 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 post-launch behaviour. Some agencies disappear the moment the final invoice is paid. This team maintained the same level of responsiveness during the hypercare period as during development, handed over thorough documentation without being asked twice, and checked in proactively a month after go-live to review performance metrics with us. That last part was entirely unprompted.

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 Game Development expertise, Energy & Utilities domain knowledge, and delivery discipline is genuinely difficult to find. We found it here and we intend to keep it.

Results that made the business case look conservative in hindsight

Tyler Nguyen / Founder & CTO - BlueRidge Software

Verified
Aug 23, 2022

Project summary: Our institution was running five disconnected systems for admissions, learning management, assessments, and student communications — we needed them unified into one cohesive platform.

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

Collaborative working style that made them feel like an extension of our team, excellent written communication for our async timezone relationship, clean and readable codebase

CONS

Their calendar books up quickly which made scheduling the initial kickoff slightly challenging — a good problem for them to have and not one that affected our delivery

5.0

Overall

5.0

Quality

5.0

Schedule

5.0

Cost

5.0

Communication

Project TypePOS System Development

IndustryEducation

Project CostLess than $10,000

DurationFeb 2025 – Feb 2026

Questions & Answers

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

I lead technology at BlueRidge Software, a mid-sized organisation in the Education sector headquartered in Austin, USA. My remit as Founder & CTO 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?

Our existing POS System 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 core engagement was POS System 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?

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 POS System Development and specific knowledge of the Education 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?

Communication was handled primarily asynchronously given the time zone difference between Austin, 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?

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?

We went live three months ago. In that time we have not had a single P1 incident, our page performance scores have improved across every measure, and the feature we had deprioritised for years because the old architecture made it too complex to implement is now in our next sprint. The platform they built has opened up our roadmap in a way we had not anticipated.

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 Education sector who were facing similar POS System Development 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.

The Manahan Group

About The Manahan Group

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