Alex Levin is the CEO and Co-Founder at L+R, an award-winning strategy consulting firm and digital design studio. Mangrove often partners with L+R for their design and UX/UI expertise. We invited Alex to offer insight into factors design firms should consider when choosing a technology partner. Here’s what he had to say.
In today’s ultra competitive marketplace, it’s important to understand how to select the perfect technology partner for mutual benefit. Once it’s understood that both parties can achieve the task at hand, the focus must turn to the process of working together. Here are some critical things we consider at L+R when we’re vetting potential technology and development partners:
- Complementary Missions. When partners are aligned, it becomes much easier to anticipate what comes next and how to fill in the gaps during a fast-paced project.
- Transparent Communication. If both companies value transparency throughout the working relationship, you fuel a seamless, efficient and trusted execution.
- Confidence in Skills. Before beginning to work together, both companies should walk through successful past projects so each partner is confident in the other’s abilities.
- Improvement-based Collaboration. Partners must play well off each other, communicating project needs clearly and offering suggestions and refinements focused on improvement.
- Desire for Excellence. Partners must strive for excellence at every stage of the project, including their initial proposals, client conversations, and how they describe their work.
- Location. True professionals live around the globe. The right technology partner is passionate and will do what it takes to meet virtually and hit deadlines–no matter if they are in the woods of North California or on the beaches of Kingston, Jamaica.
- Age. The web is more than 30 years old and forever changing. Experts can be in any generation.
- Size. The size of a partner’s organization is only important if additional resources are needed to support faster turnaround times, keep the project organized, or focus on building other components that are a part of the whole. Size alone does not correlate to the quality of final output.
“L+R chose Mangrove as its web development partner because its team fulfills these requirements,” said Ivan Leider, director of engineering at L+R. “We have confidence in the Mangrove team’s ability to effectively collaborate and communicate during the course of our projects, and we then have the joy of together celebrating the hard work and effort of a project’s successful completion.”
Joint projects between Mangrove and L+R include Factory OS, Opticos Design, and Elemental Excelerator.
Learn more about L+R here. Wondering whether your project requires collaboration between multiple studios? Ask us here.
