Keep it simple

It’s hard to make things simple but it’s very often worthwhile. We believe wholeheartedly that internet users have a short attention span, and if your application isn’t immediately intuitive to them, they’ll hit the back button. Much of our wireframing process is driven by the excellent book Don’t Make Me Think by Steve Krug, and we highly recommend it to all of our customers.

Work in small teams, closely connected

It’s tempting to think that the productivity of a software team increases in proportion to the number of team members. But we’ve found that the chemistry and low communication overhead of small teams can outweigh having additional members. We work in 2 to 6-person teams because we’ve found it makes us more efficient in building software for our customers.

Collaborate with customers constantly

We also believe that it’s important to involve the customer in every step of the process. That’s why we find daily show-and-tells to be so transformative—it enables the customer to give feedback very early in the process, before much re-work is needed.

Embrace change

Startups often begin by solving one problem, but soon find that there’s a bigger opportunity just a small pivot away. We’ve designed our process to accommodate change, and even anticipate it. After (or even during!) each iteration we encourage you to get feedback from customers to make sure what’s being built is useful to them. Oftentimes they’ll have a suggestion to make your product better, and we can help you consider and prioritize it.

Let experts be experts

We get to work with top-notch designers and developers, and we’ve found that we get the absolute best output when they’re free to make great decisions. We encourage our clients to have a clear vision of what they want, but to be open to suggestions of different ways to do things. After all, you’ve hired experts for a reason.

Be a craftsman

We believe software should be built to last—and that means it should be durable and maintainable. We practice test-driven development because it will help your team to change your app in the future without fear of breaking things. Test-driven development allows us to refactor code with confidence, in order to bring it inline with our coding standards. Craftsmanship takes time, and sometimes craftsmanship is at odds with building out new features. Our approach is to inform you of the trade-offs to help you make a great decision.