Thoughtbot

thoughtbot's teams are located throughout the Americas, Europe, West Asia, and Africa, enabling the company to take on client projects around the world. Its delivery model is fully remote.

The company's purpose and values emphasize continuous improvement, strong partnerships, transparency, and creating a diverse, equitable, inclusive, fulfilling, and safe environment for its community.

thoughtbot's Playbook and Handbook document how it makes successful web and mobile products and how it runs the company. These living documents are maintained in a private GitHub repository.

Product stages

• Rapid validation and early product strategy
• Building a new product and roadmap planning
• Team augmentation and process improvement
• DevOps, cloud, and CI/CD

Product design

• Shaping Sprints
• UX, UI, and product design
• Product management
• Accessibility, WCAG, and regulatory compliance
• Design systems
• Design research

Shaping Sprints help teams validate opportunities, assess technical feasibility, identify an impactful first version, surface assumptions, generate ideas, and test ideas with real users.

Development

• Ruby on Rails
• Hotwire
• React
• AI and machine learning integration
• React Native mobile development
• Support and maintenance
• Platform engineering and site reliability

thoughtbot designs and builds iOS, Android, and cross-platform React Native apps. Its consultants can work alongside an existing team for a flexible amount of time, using technologies including Ruby on Rails, React, and Elixir.

• US: +1 (877) 9-ROBOTS
• UK: +44 (0)20 3807 0560

The company also invites prospective clients to discuss what success looks like for their project.

The product required multiple integrations, including patient-provider access and communication, billing, and administrative functions. CloseKnit also needed to move quickly with a small team and chose thoughtbot for its Ruby on Rails expertise.

thoughtbot helped deploy Hotwire so the web team could develop the new product while the Android and iOS teams could inherit most features without extensive additional coding. The engagement also included UX design, design systems, and collaboration between designers and developers.

The result was an eight- to tenfold improvement in release speed over one year, with CloseKnit reporting that its pace continued to accelerate. The teams also improved communication and code review practices through their collaboration.

thoughtbot can lead the initial investment to establish a Design System that grows with a project and team. For existing products, a Design System audit examines design components and variations and identifies what should be documented, merged, modernized, or replaced.

Design System work can help address design debt, streamline existing features, establish cohesive standards, clarify accessibility practices, save designer time, and give developers effective documentation for components and code.

thoughtbot works with teams to understand the strengths and pain points of their current workflow. It can create a sustainable workflow that enables designers and developers to own the system, or embed a designer with the team to lead system iterations and develop in-house capabilities.

A design audit can be useful when a product's design has become difficult to iterate on or contribute to.

Fractional CTO support

A thoughtbot Fractional CTO can lead technical direction and a team, from early technical audits through hiring, process setup, and architecture decisions. Senior developers can help clarify complex decisions, conduct code reviews, improve CI/CD, and prepare development teams for long-term success.

Common support areas include:

• Technical audits and architectural planning
• Code quality standards and tooling
• Team upskilling and mentoring
• Hiring first technical leads

Fractional product management

A Fractional Product Manager can help establish a roadmap, define KPIs, and deliver value quickly. Product Managers at thoughtbot define product vision tied to business goals, prioritize roadmaps based on research and impact, run agile sprints, and improve stakeholder communication and planning.

For startups, thoughtbot can provide leadership before a full-time CTO or CPO is hired. For established companies, it can help with organizational change, restructuring, quality issues, special initiatives, or temporary senior leadership gaps.