2Q2022 News and updates
Hi clients and partners,
Take a look at what we’ve been up to over the last couple of months:
As always if we can help you work through product ideation, validation, roadmapping, upgrading or maintenance, please reach out. If you want to know what it’s like working with our teams, check out our free Mentoring/Office Hours that let designers, devs, or product leaders pair with one of our consultants to get unstuck.
Stay healthy and keep building!
thoughtbot
FREE mentoring, advice, and collaboration
Want to get to know us better or get some help with your current project or idea? thoughtbot offers free remote mentoring during Friday office hours. With team members from all of our disciplines: design, development, and product management, we can help you with strategies and next steps to keep your project moving forward successfully. Learn more and sign up here.
The value of a Design System: recording now available
In March, we hosted a great roundtable chat with industry design experts to uncover how a Design System helps products and teams be their best and some tips for implementing or optimizing. If you missed it, you can check out the event recording to hear the strategies and tactical tips.
We want to hear from you
We've been experimenting with lots of ways to engage with our community and share our learnings. We would love to hear from you on your preferences. Please fill out this quick 3 question survey. One lucky responder will receive a gift from thoughtbot.
Our team is growing
We were thrilled to onboard 14 new teammates in 1Q2022! From Minnesota to Brazil, and California to Zambia thoughtbot is expanding our global presence to retain great talent and partner with the best clients, regardless of location. We still have quite a few job openings, so check them out or share them if someone you know is looking to join a fabulous remote team.
Validation through Product Design Sprint: recording now available
We recently collaborated with our partner, Collider, to share our strategies for upfront product research and validation with their entrepreneur community in Rochester, Minnesota. Entrepreneurs can get a leg up using our Design Sprint activities to help align on the most important elements of product strategy and translate those into the right product roadmap in a handful of days. The event recording walks through why we do what we do, and shares resources so you can get started.
Getting involved with Chicago startups
We’re thrilled to be getting to know the Chicago startup community better through our new partnership with 1871. As a member, we’re able to share resources and member perks, and get involved in events and conversations to help product leaders be successful. If you’re part of this local community look out for thoughtbot opportunities and say hello!
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Add features + maintain code quality with RSpec Training
Whether you are a startup or an enterprise team, your developers can benefit from our customized RSpec Training that addresses your specific pain points and improves your current codebase at the same time. thoughtbot will improve your team’s culture, and process around testing regardless of where you are in implementation. Get in touch so we can start planning your workshops.
Summit 2022
We had a blast coming together for our annual Summit—in person this year in Brighton, England! Our team socialized & played games, talked about work (a little), met remote friends IRL, and went on adventures together. Summit is one way we build a connected remote team as well as take time to celebrate each other and our successes. If you or anyone you know would like to join us next year, consider one of our open roles!
Behind on Target API levels? We can help—Mobile Optimization Project
If you've recently launched a mobile app, or have one that needs a little TLC, thoughtbot can help you stay on top of mobile development and design standards to ensure a good user experience. In as little as two weeks, we will remedy outdated APIs, review material design standards and optimize your app store listing. Learn more about a Mobile Optimization Project.
Client success stories: new case studies are live!
We work with clients in many industries, in different stages and now locations. Among our new case studies are stories highlighting our work with Harvard Business Review, Groups Recover Together, Beyond Finance.
FREE consultations: Digital Transformation for your business
For clients who are experiencing challenges with legacy software or workflows, but aren’t sure how to kick off a technology initiative, thoughtbot offers a 30 minute consultation to talk about how you might level up your current tools and processes. Digital automation is a great way to transform your business, unburden your team and reach new levels of quality, efficiency, and scale. Read more about our service and contact us to get started.
Help us make new friends
thoughtbot is so appreciative of our client portfolio and the community we’ve been able to create. Our past clients tend to recommend us to others (thank you!) but we wanted to formalize that through our Referral Program. If you know someone looking for help, and you are comfortable making an intro, we will compensate you for that recommendation. Learn more here.
Spotlight: open (remote) leadership roles at thoughtbot
We’re looking for a few good folks! We have a number of leadership roles we are hiring for including: Director of Design Strategy, Director of Software Development, and Software Development Team Lead. Read more about the roles and apply online.
RailsConf recap
thoughtbot is proud to be an active participant in the Ruby on Rails community and a contributor in the open source community. At the live RailsConf event in May, our 4 (!) thoughtbot speakers took on various topics from engines to testing, to best practice workflows and also got involved in sessions on Diversity in Engineering and Ruby MX events. Our blog summary shares some fun pics, each speaker’s feedback on the conference and the slides from each talk.
Mission Control Teaser
thoughtbot's Mission Control team helps developers deliver quality code and build systems to appropriately scale products. For projects with heavy production workloads we make CI/CD pipelines that allow fearless deployment. Our team can help you implement the tenets of Site Reliability Engineering (SRE) so sites remain available and responsive, while maintaining a rapid pace of feature development. Stay tuned for upcoming events with our CTO to learn how we can help your team speed up feature deployment, reduce post-deployment defects, gracefully recover from incidents, and deliver with quality, security, and compliance.