Situational Summary
OpenSesame is a TechEd company, whose mission is to help companies develop the world's most productive and admired workforces. They envision a world where everyone can easily access the training they need to advance their purpose.
Today, online learning has never mattered more. OpenSesame harnesses the power of technology to help organizations of all sizes to create and deploy training to do great things, regardless of industry. Through their comprehensive catalog of elearning courses from the world’s top publishers, they are an end-to-end solution for their clients: finding courses, mapping to core competencies, syncing them with LMS, increasing utilization, improving L&D programs, etc. Clients engage with the company either through their premier offering, OpenSesame Plus, or their “pay as you go” model, for companies with more modest use levels.
The profile of those Clients range from Enterprise Companies to SMSBs. They also work with Publishers to convert their material into courses that are then sold to their Enterprise and SMSB market. Those Clients recognize OpenSesame is not just a reseller of learning content. Rather, OpenSesame ensures the learning content meets very high-quality standards, expertly curated so that the content meets their Client’s goals and the learning style of their workforce.
While the Company was founded in 2011 in Portland, OR, the Pandemic has accelerated their ongoing journey to becoming a remote first organization. Now, their current 250 employees are more distributed. Nowhere is this more the case than in engineering. Their 40+ engineering team (and growing) are located all over the US.
OpenSesame closed a successful D round in July of 2021, with $50mm in investment coming from JMI Equity, FTV Capital, and Altos Ventures.
To support future growth of their engineering team, OpenSesame believes it will be important to build a long-term partnership with a leading global Service Provider. This will be critical for them to grow as an organization, delivering on company goals, and being mindful of how engineering dollars are spent.
They have a lot of aggressive goals. Given the demand for top talent in the US, it is time and cost prohibitive to rely solely on domestic channels. Talent in the US is very expensive and not readily available in the US. As great an organization as OpenSesame is, they can’t compete with the FAANG (Facebook, Amazon, Apple, Netflix, and Google) companies. A great remote Partner will help them avoid these issues.
However, they are not looking for a “vendor” to provide “coders”, As they are a company that truly cares about people –that puts people at the front and center of their business– and they are keen to build a relationship where the remote team becomes a fully onboarded, collaborative extension of the OpenSesame team.
This is an ongoing scope of work, with a continuous pipeline of work for the foreseeable future. These vendors will not be treated as 2nd class citizens or staff augmentation but a true member of their agile teams - expected to produce quality work alongside their fellow engineers.
Their vision is to add 15, remote engineers in 2022. They will want to work with the selected partner on the best pathway to that 15 number without sacrificing quality.
Their tech stack is broad but includes: React, Typescript, Node, Javascript, SQL, PostgresSQL (a plus), AWS, Terraform, Docker, Lambda, Step-functions, Okta, PHP (legacy), Drupal (legacy).
As far as location, they will consider Service Providers in any of the traditional outsourcing regions. However, the team constructed must be able to work at least 4- 6 hours of the Portland (PST) business day. A majority of their Leadership (6) is in PST time zone, while the rest (2) are in EST.
It would be ideal if the Partner had TechEd experience and demonstrated capabilities in Machine Learning and Data Science. Having an AWS certification will be important. The Partner should be highly experienced in building teams that are reasonably fluent in English.
There is some concern they will be able to find the quality of talent needed. Even with a 4-6 hour overlap, there is a worry there may be a drop off in production when working with their existing engineering teams.
As far as budget, they are targeting $34/hr or $6k/mo. They have some wiggle room but would like to stay in this range, at least for mid level engineers.
While OpenSesame has never outsourced before, there is great experience within at least half of their team. Some have personally set up and run offshore development companies and teams. The general sentiment is there are pros (deeper pool of talent, speed to hire, 24x7 coverage, pricing) and cons (timezone, cultural, language) when outsourcing.
OpenSesame is an Agile organization, with some slight changes. While they do not rely on dedicated SCRUM Masters, teams otherwise feature Product Owners/Product Managers, Dev Managers and/or Technical Team Leads, Dev Team, and UX Designer. They use a “Trio” approach (Team Lead or Dev Manager, PM & UX) to help guide the Dev. Teams delivery and sprint goals. Each Agile team functions differently but held to similar standards of delivery and quality. On Average a team would be 5 to 8 people in size.
The company culture is all about autonomy and flexibility. They do not fear failing, rather their concern is not learning anything from that failure. Ultimately, you need to be able to deliver what you promised when you promised it.
As mentioned, this is very important to their business. They believe that a successful experience here will influence how they onboard future remote engineers, whether FTE or contracts. Because of this, they would like to get going ASAP.
When selecting a Partner, they will consider (again) time zone overlap, pricing, and references. They will also want to know about the general retention rate. They will need visibility into the quality level or resources proposed for the team. Those engineers will need to show a pattern of loyalty to the projects (companies) they have worked with previously. The review and selection process will involve the CTO, VP of Engineering, and relevant Managers from OpenSesame.
Our Recommendations
Accelerance has considered your objectives and partner selection criteria in the context of all members in the Accelerance Global Partner Network. Given your declared needs and objectives, Accelerance is delighted to introduce the below Certified Partners as our top aligned choices to work as a dedicated Partner.
These accomplished groups are excellent representatives of the 60+ Members of our Global Service Provider Network.
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