About Bear & Giraffe
With over a decade of experience in web development using agile methodologies, their team philosophy is focused on delivering what the customer needs through an iterative approach of short feedback cycles. Bear & Giraffe acts as the technical partner or technical arm of startups or small businesses that are working on a great idea but do not have a technical founder to help build their product.
Last updated May 13, 2026
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Bear & Giraffe Reviews
Write a ReviewA DevOps engagement that delivered cultural change as well as technical change
Siobhan Gallagher / Chief Technology Officer - Northumbria FinTech LtdMay 15, 2026
Project summary: Dynamic pricing had been a manual process for years. We knew the revenue management opportunity was significant but lacked the technical capability to build the models and connect them to our booking engine.
What made the most difference in practice was the quality of the engineering judgment on this team. Not the ability to execute a specification — that is a baseline expectation. The ability to recognise when a specification was suboptimal, explain why, propose an alternative, and support the client in making a decision about it. That consultative dimension elevated the output beyond what the brief described and resulted in a product that is more fit for purpose than the one we had originally specified.
Senior-level engineering presence throughout the entire project, not just during the pitch, honest and commercially fair handling of scope changes, codebase that our internal team praised on review
Time zone coordination required some deliberate overlap management from both sides in the first couple of sprints, after which we had an efficient async rhythm that worked for the whole project
Questions & Answers
Platform engineering work that let our product teams move independently at last
Lars Pfeiffer / VP of Technology - NordTech Logistik GmbHMay 10, 2026
Project summary: A previous engagement had delivered something that worked in staging and struggled in production. We approached this project with greater rigour in vendor selection as a result.
We gave this team an aggressive timeline, a technically complex scope, and a client-side project team that was stretched thin and not always available at the speed the engagement required. They absorbed all of that gracefully. Where they needed input they were precise about what they needed and when. Where they could proceed independently they did. The result was a delivery that landed on time despite the constraints on our side, which I regard as evidence of genuine professional maturity.
Senior-level engineering presence throughout the entire project, not just during the pitch, honest and commercially fair handling of scope changes, codebase that our internal team praised on review
Their discovery process is more rigorous than we were accustomed to and required more preparation from our side than we had initially allocated — but the quality of what followed justified every hour of it
Questions & Answers
Project execution that matched the proposal in every dimension that mattered
Abdullah Al-Shehri / Head of Innovation - Desert Tech VenturesMar 11, 2026
Project summary: Warehouse management inefficiencies were adding cost and introducing errors at a rate that was becoming visible to clients. A modernised WMS was the agreed solution internally — we needed a partner to build it.
The project brief was ambitious and we had received proposals ranging from two to five times our eventual budget from other vendors. This team came back with a proposal that was commercially realistic and technically credible — and then delivered against it. That alignment between proposal and outcome is not something I take for granted. I have been on the other side of it enough times to know it requires both honesty in the sales process and discipline in delivery. We experienced both.
Production system that has performed as specified since go-live without remediation work, documentation thorough enough to support internal maintenance, knowledge transfer that left our team genuinely capable
Their insistence on a detailed functional specification before development began felt like friction at the time. In retrospect, it was the reason the development phase ran without the ambiguity that has derailed similar projects for us previously
Questions & Answers
Cloud architecture that reduced our monthly infrastructure spend by over a third
Marcus Holloway / SVP of Engineering - Vertex Cloud DynamicsMar 03, 2026
Project summary: Our engineering capacity was committed to maintaining existing systems and could not absorb a net-new build of this complexity. An external partner with the right skills was the only viable option.
The integration layer was the part of the project I was most concerned about going in. Our system landscape is complex, several of the upstream APIs we relied on were poorly documented, and two third-party vendors had a history of unpredictable response times on integration questions. This team managed all of that. They documented what the upstream vendors could not, built resilience into the integration architecture where the upstream behaviour was unreliable, and delivered a solution that works as specified in production. I could not have asked for more.
Commercially transparent throughout — no hidden assumptions, no bill shock at the end, change requests that were fair and clearly explained rather than used as a margin-recovery mechanism
Pipeline availability for kickoff required a few weeks of lead time — in hindsight that selection pressure means you are working with a team that is in demand for the right reasons
Questions & Answers
Software that solved the actual problem rather than the stated one — a crucial difference
Kelsey Drummond / Director of Digital Health - Crestline Health PartnersFeb 25, 2026
Project summary: B2B customer churn was concentrated among accounts that had complained about portal usability. We needed a complete redesign of the self-service experience before the next contract renewal cycle.
We had worked with three agencies before this engagement. The comparison is not flattering to the others. What distinguished this team was a systematic approach to understanding the problem before proposing a solution — something that sounds obvious and is practiced far less often than it should be. The delivery phase ran to schedule, the codebase is clean enough that our internal engineers made positive comments during handover review, and we have not logged a critical incident in five months of live operation. We intend to use them for our next phase of work.
Deep domain knowledge that reduced the discovery overhead significantly, proactive risk identification before issues became incidents, delivery cadence that our stakeholders found reassuring
Pipeline availability for kickoff required a few weeks of lead time — in hindsight that selection pressure means you are working with a team that is in demand for the right reasons