About Orthogonal
Orthogonal works with clients to plan, build, and ship digital products. The company's main offerings are UI/UX Design and Mobile App Development. Orthogonal employs 10 - 49 people. Projects are generally billed around $150 - $199 / hr/hr. The team is based in Chicago, IL. This gives a quick snapshot of what to expect when working with Orthogonal.
Where We Specialize
Industry Expertise
Typical Project Size
Orthogonal Reviews
Write a ReviewApp store launch with a four-point-eight average rating in the first month
Lars Pfeiffer / VP of Technology - NordTech Logistik GmbHMay 31, 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.
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.
Collaborative culture that made the team feel like a genuine extension of our organisation, strong asynchronous communication across time zones, zero-drama handling of the inevitable mid-project changes
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
Machine learning in production that the board could see working within eight weeks
Omar Al-Farsi / Chief Technology Officer - Falcon Digital VenturesMay 03, 2026
Project summary: Our client portal had been built in 2017 and had not received meaningful investment since. Clients were contrasting it unfavourably with the portals of our competitors in pitches.
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.
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
We underestimated the input required from our subject matter experts during the requirements phase. The team flagged this early but our resource planning did not fully reflect it — our responsibility, not theirs
Questions & Answers
Security posture transformed from a known liability to a competitive differentiator
Liselotte Bakker / Head of Platform Engineering - Harbour Digital BVApr 02, 2026
Project summary: A merger had left us with two incompatible student information systems. We needed a consolidation path that preserved historical data, maintained service continuity, and met accreditation requirements.
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.
Architectural decisions designed for longevity rather than just the current brief, thorough automated test coverage, post-launch stability that validated every technical choice made during discovery
We underestimated the input required from our subject matter experts during the requirements phase. The team flagged this early but our resource planning did not fully reflect it — our responsibility, not theirs
Questions & Answers
An honest assessment of where we were, followed by a credible plan for where we needed to go
Aoife Brennan / VP of Product Engineering - Emerald Digital LtdMar 07, 2026
Project summary: Cross-agency data sharing had been blocked by incompatible systems for four years. A secure integration platform was the prerequisite for every transformation initiative in our roadmap.
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 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
A studio team who played the game obsessively and built it accordingly
Clémentine Aubert / Head of Digital Products - Arc-en-Ciel Digital SASFeb 04, 2026
Project summary: Regulatory submission timelines required a document management platform that could handle version control, access permissions, and audit trails at a scale our existing tools were not designed for.
The thing that retrospectively seems most significant is how little drama there was. Complex technology projects tend to accumulate incidents, escalations, and tense conversations. This one did not. Problems were surfaced before they became incidents. Scope changes were handled with process rather than conflict. Risks were managed rather than avoided. That level of maturity is rare in my experience and it made the delivery feel almost effortless from our side, which I know it was not from theirs.
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
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
Roadmap that finally put our infrastructure investment in language the CFO could approve
Cameron Aldrich / Head of Digital Operations - Northstar Logistics CorpJan 02, 2026
Project summary: Track-and-trace capability had gone from a differentiator to a table-stakes requirement and our platform had neither. We needed to close the gap before our next enterprise tender cycle.
The thing that retrospectively seems most significant is how little drama there was. Complex technology projects tend to accumulate incidents, escalations, and tense conversations. This one did not. Problems were surfaced before they became incidents. Scope changes were handled with process rather than conflict. Risks were managed rather than avoided. That level of maturity is rare in my experience and it made the delivery feel almost effortless from our side, which I know it was not from theirs.
Collaborative culture that made the team feel like a genuine extension of our organisation, strong asynchronous communication across time zones, zero-drama handling of the inevitable mid-project changes
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