Interview with Oleksandra Rostovtseva, Co- founder and Business Manager - Altamira

Oleksandra Rostovtseva  

Co- founder and Business Manager, GBKSOFT

Give us a quick overview on GBKSOFT. When and how did you begin this journey and what were your motives to be successful in app development?

The industry has been experiencing a conflict between a developers’ desire for perfect code and business need to stay agile and adapt to circumstances. As a result, you either get the perfect code but spend huge amount and insane calendar time, or a quick solution but with spaghetti code which is not scalable and needs to be rewritten.
GBKSOFT was formed to provide a compromise between a need to do it “now” and a need to do it the right way. And since the company was founded by two programmers who are code-oriented and me, a former project manager, we managed to find a perfect combination of needs and wants of coding and business. So GBKSOFT handles all complicated needs a business has with the help of development.
 

What is your role in the management and development of GBKSOFT?

I play a lot of roles at GBKSOFT but the primary one is forming and maintaining company‘s main principles and key processes. For instance, in case there’s a new business challenge, I’m the one to resolve it and to introduce a process that will never allow a similar situation to happen again. And the fact that the company is very much client-oriented is mainly the result of my effort.


Tell us about your biggest achievement in the industry
 
I’d say that our biggest achievement is yet to come. We have been featured as Top App Developers numerous times by numerous resources, we’ve participated in the  international Stevie Awards Judging Committee, we are highly recognized with positive reviews and ratings from our employees on the internal HR market, we’ve participated in different charity projects and developed our own ones, our articles on project risk management were reposted by Yahoo Finance, our clients always give us very flattering feedback on lots of popular tech resources, and we are extremely grateful for all these things. However, we think that more accomplishments are still to come and we are setting big goals for our company and employees.


How do you schedule the development phases of the apps to promise the timeline to your clients?

We split up the development process into sprints and add the risks based on the risk system we elaborated. Tracking of the timelines is continuous, meaning that our self-developed system will alert us instantly if we are out of estimated timelines. And if this happens, we take actions to prevent delays.


How do you help your clients in choosing the right yet profitable platform for app development?

Since we are very client-oriented, we have a team of an Account Manager, a Business Analyst and an Architect working with a client from the client’s first contact. The account Manager gathers all the initial information on the project from a client, Business Analyst elaborates the solution out of it and Architect makes sure that these solutions are technically possible and scalable, keeping in mind the client’s budget. And the best part of this is that the initial stage happens even before a client pays, meaning that a client gets the initial BA and tech research plus estimated budget and timeline for free.


Which would you suggest for a successful and profitable business progression, Native or hybrid apps? How do you define the factors that influenced you to make this choice?

It depends on every particular business and its needs. There are applications with the functionality that is in absolute need of the native application development because hybrid won’t provide proper speed, scalability, and will take the essential part of the device’s productivity. While other businesses require pretty straightforward apps, for which hybrid makes total sense and allows them to save a significant part of the budget for other purposes, e.g. marketing. We provide only native apps development services since we believe that this is the only way you can make sure that Apple Store and Google Play will always maintain the apps. And in case our clients require hybrid development for some reason, we usually recommend our partners that are experts in hybrid development.


How do you scheme your pricing model? How do you fix your budget?

We offer fixed price and waterfall development OR time & material scrum development. Our clients usually choose the second option since it’s more agile and allows them to add changes as the development process goes. In the case of the fixed budget, our BA provides very detailed specifications based on which we do the estimation and develop a product.


How helpful are the mobile apps developed by your team, for enhancing your clients’ business?

Since the majority of clients we work with are Business Owners, the applications we develop have the direct and essential impact on their businesses and even industries. Specifically, they allow companies to automate the processes, manage their employees, get instant data from any part of the world, easily track the activities and stats, be notified of anything at any time, better reach their clients, increase the number of customers, etc. Per our clients’ feedback stats, some of them managed to increase the productivity of their business on average by almost 30% (and some by 50%) by just using an application.


What according to you are the best practices to attain client satisfaction?

The key to client satisfaction is to listen to your client and to resolve the problem he/she comes to you with. We never say that we don’t make mistakes, we do. But this is about the way we resolve those problems that matters. We are honest about all our problems and achievements and we expect the same from our clients. And, thus, every client is our partner and sometimes a friend, even.


How do you update your business system to be in pace with the technological advancements?

Our clients do not give us a chance to get outdated. Since we mostly strive to efficiently resolve business problems, we have to be creative and keep up to date. That is why we have an architect department where there’s a process of investigation, research and sharing of acquired experience across the team.


What are your thoughts about AR, VR and Internet of Things (IoT)?

We have expertise in IoT development. AR and VR are something we do not usually work with (but we partner with companies that do). So I can mainly talk about IoT. The reason why this is one of the technologies we focus on is that, our clients are often looking for solutions to automate their business processes or the way their customers reach them, or the stats, etc. And all of these things usually require the work with the hardware that the business uses. This is exactly how we help clients save money on trivial things like tracking their employee’s attendance, reading orders from non-phone devices, tracking the corporate items given to employees, etc. The biggest challenges in IoT are documentation and communication between hardware and software development teams. But these are two things we are particularly good at. 


What do you think will be the future of Mobile technology?

I think that the way mobile technologies interact with users might improve. Specifically, I believe that mobile technologies will work to predict what users need and want compared to waiting for users to tell them. And the main challenge here would be to provide just the right combination of design, usability, productivity, and functionality of applications that meets that purpose.