Digital Media Consultancy — Lahore & Islamabad, Pakistan
Embedded Engineering Pod & CRM Integrations for Digital Media Consultancy
- 5
- Devs embedded
- 1
- PM embedded
- Lahore · Islamabad
- Locations
- Ongoing engagement
- Status
Project details
The Challenge
The client is an established Pakistani digital marketing consultancy with offices in Lahore and Islamabad, serving a mixed roster of regional and international brands. As the business grew its technology footprint — campaign tooling, attribution dashboards, custom integrations between marketing platforms — the internal engineering capacity stopped keeping up. Hiring senior engineers into a marketing firm is a structurally hard problem, and the workload swings between deep-build periods and quieter campaign-tail windows in a way that doesn't fit a fixed in-house headcount.
The brief to us was less a project than a relationship: provide sustained, embedded engineering capacity at senior level, integrated into the consultancy's project squads, with continuity owned by us so the client's leadership didn't have to re-onboard people every quarter. Build the marketing-tech apps, CRM extensions, and cross-system integrations the business actually needed, on the cadence the business actually needed them.
Our Approach
We structured the engagement as a long-running team-augmentation pod. We sourced and embedded five senior developers and one project manager, all based in Lahore and Islamabad and timezone-aligned with the client's offices. The pod sits inside the client's planning cadence — sprint reviews, standups, retro participation — and is treated as part of the client's engineering function, not as a vendor delivering against statements of work.
The work itself has spanned the surface area you'd expect of a modern marketing consultancy: custom marketing-tech apps for specific campaigns, internal tools for the consultancy's account teams, and a series of CRM extensions and cross-system integrations that hold the client's stack together.
- HubSpot extensions — custom properties, workflow extensions, and bidirectional sync with internal tooling so the CRM stays canonical.
- Lead scoring & routing — bespoke scoring logic per client engagement, with automated routing into the right account team and the right CRM stage.
- Reporting dashboards — unified reporting that pulls from campaign platforms, the CRM, and internal performance data, surfaced to the consultancy's leadership and to individual brand clients.
- Marketing-tech apps — campaign-specific tools built quickly to a deadline, then iterated or retired as the campaign demanded.
- Integration plumbing — the unglamorous but load-bearing connectors between platforms that keep data flowing without manual rekeying.
The project manager on the pod plays a load-bearing role. The consultancy's engagements are time-pressured and brand-sensitive, and having a dedicated PM inside the pod means scope, risk, and timeline conversations happen with someone who has full context — not with a remote account manager who has to triage three other clients first. The PM owns the pod's delivery commitments and the client's leadership treats them as the single point of contact for engineering matters.
Stack varies by workstream — Laravel · Node · React · HubSpot APIs · MySQL — with the pod choosing the right tool for each piece of work rather than forcing every job into the same framework.
The Outcome
The engagement is multi-year and ongoing. The five-developer-plus-PM pod has shipped a steady stream of marketing-tech apps, CRM extensions, and integrations over the life of the relationship, with continuity that means a returning brand campaign or a follow-on internal tool benefits from the team already knowing the consultancy's stack and conventions. The client's leadership treats the pod as part of their engineering function rather than an external supplier.
The structural win is that the consultancy has predictable senior engineering capacity it can lean on without carrying the fixed cost of an in-house team that has to be kept fed during quieter quarters. The pod sizes and shapes its workload around the consultancy's real demand curve, and the relationship has compounded into the kind of institutional context that's hard to replicate with a fresh vendor.
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