Think Company

Introduce your business and what you do there.

I’m the CEO of Projector PSA, and we have a professional services automation technology platform. We work with services businesses, and we do everything from project management, resource planning, and resource tracking in a single system.

What challenge were you trying to address with Think Company?

We wanted to redesign our UI because we did a rebrand and redesign, and everything from our font, colors, and brand identity changed. We hired Think Company to help us with our design system, UI library, and React and React Redux components.

What was the scope of their involvement?

We provided them with our business’ background, including what our customers typically saw, the journey they went through in using our product, and some of the UI challenges that we identified based on customers’ feedback.

After that, we provided Think Company with a review of the different personas that were logging into the system. They then focused on creating a design system and component library for us. The team used Adobe, Figma, React, and a couple of project management tools on their side.

What is the team composition?

We probably worked with six different people from their team at any given time, including their project manager, UI/UX designers, and UI developer.

How did you come to work with Think Company?

Think Company was referred to us by someone in our private equity group. 4–5 other companies we talked to had a strict approach on how they were going to do our project and they offered a generic solution to our challenge. However, Think Company offered us a unique package that aimed at providing what we needed.

What is the status of this engagement?

We worked together from March–July 2020.

What evidence can you share that demonstrates the impact of the engagement? 

From a business perspective, we were able to increase our opportunity close ratio. In addition, we were able to sign more business, and we received positive feedback from our users. There was also a reduction in clicks and an increase in usage across our product. Overall, Think Company’s work made a significant impact on our business.

How did Think Company perform from a project management standpoint?

They had a perfect project management process.

What did you find most impressive about them?

We appreciated that they focused on our problem first as opposed to giving us work that they already did before. We had a unique situation and they really made it a lot easier because they understood our problems. Above all, the team allowed us to adapt to a much more reasonable scope that fit the bill of what we were trying to achieve.

Are there any areas they could improve?

No, they were great. I’d highly recommend them.

Do you have any advice for potential customers?

Ask for Shawn (Design Manager) — he was awesome.

Introduce your business and what you do there.

I'm the senior director of analytics for the local media development team of a mass media and entertainment conglomerate. We create product platforms and experiences to help our business connect with the local communities that we serve.

What challenge were you trying to address with Think Company?

We create an annual set of state investment reports for our lobbyists. This includes state-level data points around all the ways that we invest locally as a company — everything from the number of people we employ in each particular state, to the amount of money we have invested in our network infrastructure, to the number of dollars we’ve donated to nonprofit organizations. 

We have over 30 data points that we provide in what used to be printed reports, and our lobbyists are often looking to tell more nuanced, specific stories with the data. What they wanted to be able to do was pick and choose data points and put these into a custom report template, rather than have us supply kitchen-sink documentation. 

We hired Think Company to help us build a portal where we could bring reports into a digital-first atmosphere and allow lobbyists to customize the reports according to their particular audience conversation and circumstance.

What was the scope of their involvement?

Think Company built a custom digital portal that our lobbyists could interact with. This portal was developed to store all of our custom, state-level data as well as a number of state-level photos, maps, and media.

The team built it in such a way that our lobbyists could quickly and easily create custom, one-page state reports in no more than five clicks. These lobbyists are not necessarily tech-savvy; they are relationship people, which means they need to get in, get out, and get what they need in a way that is essentially foolproof.

We asked Think Company not only to design the UI and the lobbyist-facing platform but also to build the backend to be able to accommodate all of our data and store it in the way we needed. 

What is the team composition?

We worked with Emily (Senior Project Manager), Keith (Principal Experience Designer), Stu (Senior Technical Lead), and Ian (Technical Lead) for the actual project. I touched base with John (Director of Technology) and Dave (SPV, Business Development) at the beginning as part of the introduction and scoping process.

How did you come to work with Think Company?

We heard about Think Company through our colleagues; they had worked with other departments in our company. We saw that their previous work was excellent. The end-product was exceptional and the execution was thoughtfully and intentionally well done. It was based on that referral that we selected them over other competitors.

The team was also very Intuitive and asked us questions that we hadn't even thought of. We could tell that they were really a step ahead in terms of technical skills and project understanding.

How much have you invested with them?

We spent $140,000.

What is the status of this engagement?

The project began in early February 2021 and concluded in May 2021.

What evidence can you share that demonstrates the impact of the engagement?

I don't remember the specific metrics but one of our main challenges was to deliver the portal on time. We were really pressed to roll out in May 2021 no matter what. Our priority was to stick to the project timeline and budget and Think Company Was able to accomplish exactly that. They successfully delivered on time and within budget.

Beyond that, the other metrics revolved around meeting the scope of work that we had set out, several key attributes of the project, and a number of qualitative product requirements. For example, the portal needed to be able to populate a one-page report based on the state that was selected without any glitches. All of those product requirements were met by Think Company.

How did Think Company perform from a project management standpoint?

In the past, I’ve worked with teams that are more sequential and would pass off the work to the next person or department that was involved. Think Company was also sequential, but their entire team stayed involved throughout the project, which I really liked. As we moved from one milestone to the next, different members of the team would take the lead while the previous leads would still be present in case anything popped up that needed their immediate attention. 

We had weekly meetings led by Emily, who always came prepared with a deck of what the milestone was for the week, what the next major sign-off we would be working towards, and how we were going to benchmark towards the timeline and requirements. It was extremely well organized and well sequenced. 

What did you find most impressive about them?

Think Company was really aligned with their process, which is the biggest differentiator between them and other firms I've worked with. They have a system in place that works and that they all knew how to execute. 

Are there any areas they could improve?

I can't think of anything right now.

Do you have any advice for potential customers?

Do as much initial work as possible. Really think through how you would define your outcomes. If that’s something you need help with, make sure that you build that into the project timeline. The clearer you are, the easier it will be for Think Company to help you succeed.

Introduce your business and what you do there.

I’m the CEO and co-founder of Sleigh, a consumer services business during the holiday season. We receive packages on our customer’s behalf, and we unbox, inventory, and wrap them — those are Christmas presents that they get for their family and friends. Thus, we’re a multi-sided marketplace for multiple standpoint customers.

What challenge were you trying to address with Think Company?

We needed to create an inventory system that was both operational and customer-facing.

What was the scope of their involvement?

Think Company helped us develop our system’s web applications. Their services included page design, UX design, and front and backend development. They used Ruby on Rails and jQuery.

By the time Think Company came into the project, I had already designed most of the UX, so they focused more on the development. We did the wireframes, and they did certain pages. Then, they built out the functionality — it was all very well organized.

On the customer-facing side, our customers can log what they’re getting for each person on their gift list and see when they could expect the delivery on a Sleigh location. On the operational side, we’re able to see what items to expect by what date, log them in the inventory as received, take photographs of them, and store them in our physical inventory.

We also have a gift wrapping assignment where customers can select among the different wrapping papers to wrap each of their gifts, so it’s a fully customizable and personalized experience — the application helps us facilitate that.

What is the team composition?

We worked with a project manager, a frontend developer, a backend developer, and a QA person. We also worked with a designer in the beginning.

How did you come to work with Think Company?

Think Company was recommended to us by a friend of a friend. We evaluated three other agencies and chose them based on their merits. When they were pitching us their services, they brought in their full team to do so — we could tell that they were really engaged in the vision of the project and that they had expertise.

My co-founder is a woman, and one of Sleigh’s criteria is that all of our vendors need to have diversity and female representation. One of the deciding factors of choosing Think Company was that they were the only company that had female representation in about half of their team.

What is the status of this engagement?

We started working together in May 2020, and the application went live in September 2020.

What evidence can you share that demonstrates the impact of the engagement? 

One of the main successful results was the speed of log in the inventory. We get hundreds of deliveries from multiple providers every single day at our shop during the holiday season, and we had to do all of that login manually before having the application, which took about two minutes for every single delivery.

With the application that Think Company built, that login time was cut to just a few seconds, which really sped up our operations. The application has also allowed us to have multiple people operating our services from multiple locations, something that was impossible without the gift inventory system.

Our customers were really happy with the application this year, so we couldn’t be happier with the service that Think Company provided.

How did Think Company perform from a project management standpoint?

Think Company’s project management was awesome. I’ve worked on large technology projects for major Fortune 500 companies, and this was one of the best-managed projects I’ve ever worked on.

Think Company used Agile sprints as the project progressed, and they were really great about having clear plans and deliverables for each of those sprints. They used Basecamp for project management, to which we had access, and they also used Jira on their end, to which they offered access. However, we didn’t want to get into the weeds of it.

We had 2–3 meetings a week on a regular and scheduled basis. The expectations for those meetings were planned in advance, and they were very well organized from an agenda perspective.

Think Company was very responsive. They usually responded within one hour or within the same day at most.

What did you find most impressive about them?

Think Company’s team was great to work with. They really tried to understand our business, our customers, and our goals. They didn’t just tactically and transactionally build the application to get the job done. They wanted to build the best experience for us, our operators, and our customers, and they achieved that.

Are there any areas they could improve?

No.

Do you have any advice for potential customers?

Come prepared to be engaged. Be enthused by building your application because Think Company will be ready to match that enthusiasm, and it’ll only make your project and process better.

Introduce your business and what you do there.

I work for Penn Mutual Life Insurance and I’m the AVP of product marketing.

What challenges were you trying to address with Think Company?

We wanted to update our website and make our content more digitally focused. Much of our content was uploaded to our website as PDFs.

What was the scope of their involvement?

They provided design and strategic services for our website. Our in-house team took care of most of the development, but Think Company helped with conceptualization, creating wireframes, and web design. They also reached out to users and stakeholders to get their feedback on the website. 

What is the team composition?

We worked with a team of 5–10 people including a design lead, tech lead, project manager, and research lead. 

How did you come to work with Think Company?

I wasn’t directly involved in the hiring process. However, they’re local to us which was important. We looked at two other companies in the Philadelphia area but decided to work with Think Company because of word-of-mouth recommendations. 

How much have you invested in them?

We invested around $400,000. 

What is the status of this engagement?

We started working together in the summer of 2019. However, the bulk of the work was done in November and December of that year. We wrapped up in June 2020. However, there’s still some maintenance and updates they’re taking care of. 

What evidence can you share that demonstrates the impact of the engagement?

The website hasn’t launched yet, so we don’t have any metrics to track their success. However, feedback from our community has been very positive. The design is sleek, and the website is easier to use than our previous iteration. 

How did Think Company perform from a project management standpoint?

We had a bit of a rocky start, but over time everything came together. We were struggling on both sides. As soon as they made a change to their project management, everything fell into place. 

We used Basecamp to manage the project. 

What did you find most impressive about them?

Their knowledge of the technical elements of building a marketing website was impressive. We were also surprised by their thorough research. At first, we were skeptical about the intensity of their research phase, however, at the end of the project, it was clear that their methods paid off. 

Are there any areas they could improve?

We could’ve done some more team building changes so the process would move along smoothly. It’s important to make sure members of a third-party team mesh well with internal teammates. Beyond that, it was a great interaction. 

Do you have any advice for potential customers? 

Speak candidly and transparently upfront about the research and feedback aspects of the project. This drives their work, so it’s important to pay attention to it.

Introduce your business and what you do there.

I’m the former CEO of a business management software company.

What challenge were you trying to address with Think Company?

When we acquired the business and I was brought on board, it was a really well-run company, but it had been a mom and pop and was run for profitability rather than growth. Therefore, there hadn’t been a ton of investment in the team, internal systems and go to market strategy or really in keeping the technology fully up to date. We observed was that the codebase and the technology stack was somewhat obsolete.

On top of that, the UX was definitely reflective of an organic process that had been built up over time, adding feature by feature without really an intention or holistic view of what that experience would be like for the end-user.

We weren’t in a great position to scale or to have a compelling offering for new client acquisition. As we were rethinking technology, it made total sense to also think about the UX at the same time.

What was the scope of their involvement?

Think Company created designed the UI/UX and established a framework for a business management platform.

They took a full look at how users were experiencing the system, what work they were trying to accomplish, the workflows they were going through in order to do that, where the frustrations were and what was working well among other things.

With that, we came up with a lot of new ideas around what the experience should be like, what the paradigm is for how people use this, and how can we introduce it without giving too much from a change management perspective and without frustrating users. It is totally new and different and really hard for existing users to make that transition.

At that same time, we wanted to make it as modern and user-friendly as possible and have them provide us with a framework that would allow us to continue to add features and build the solution overtime without going down the same track of making a really crowded, jumbled, and cluttered experience.

It was a lot about information gathering from various stakeholders. They met with our product people, they met with our salespeople and a number of clients. We h identified a range of clients, different sizes, different levels of sophistication, different tenures with the product, and not only engaged with them to ask them questions about their experience, but they also observed their usage firsthand. That process informed everything we did afterward.

They created a comprehensive solution. It started with ideas and then evolved into wireframes. Ultimately, it was a full system for managing UI, so we could give the end product to our engineers and have them have a toolkit that they could use for ongoing UI complete with icons, workflows, and tools to manage those.

What is the team composition?

Over the course of the project, we worked with at least a half dozen people. They had a really broad range of skillsets working on this. There was a project manager, there were graphic designers, there were people who had expertise in workflow, but there were also people who had expertise in just day gathering and observing users and collecting the information that would inform decisions.

How did you come to work with Think Company?

Both businesses are based in Philadelphia and we learned about them through the Philadelphia tech community. We did an RFP, scoped the work that we needed to have done, and we did an assessment of a few different vendor partners. Think was unanimously the group that we felt the most excited about working with.  

How much have you invested in them?

We spent between $100,000–$150,000.

What is the status of this engagement?

We worked on this effort from July–December 2014.

What evidence can you share that demonstrates the impact of the engagement?

Our engineers were able to work from a toolkit that could easily be scaled. This was all part of a broader change management effort and part of a broader investment in the future growth of the business.

As all those things came online together, someone just turned on the high beam lights. Everything came together. The product was right, the go-to-market was right, our topline execution from lead to collecting sales and renewals was right and the business just took off. It would have not been possible had we not elected to really invest in the UI and had they not delivered on their promises the way they did.

Our existing clients hated it at first. I learned that we didn’t do a good enough job managing the change, communicating the extent of the change, and providing resources to facilitate a smooth transition. It wasn’t that the outcome was bad, it was that the transition for people was painful. Over time, those very same people came back to us and told us it was objectively far superior to what we had before and that they just needed to understand it better.

Still, we wouldn’t have been able to do it ourselves. The team had such diverse skillsets that we wouldn’t have been able to find just by hiring an additional person. On top of that, it would have been more expensive.

How did Think Company perform from a project management standpoint?

It was really good. are complex things we were trying to solve. It requires commitment, adjustments, and really getting familiar with one another. Thankfully, that was a strength for both of our teams. It was hard to start, but pretty quickly, we got really comfortable and good at communicating, which made it all work.

What did you find most impressive about them?

They really helped frame the project at a time when our thinking about it was almost definitely way too limited and way too naïve. They were definitely thinking about creating a system that was far more scalable in terms of time, how the system was going to evolve, for the users. They were thoughtful about creating a sustainable system rather than just providing us with a new UI and navigation. They really thought about the project in a holistic way and that was super valuable.

Are there any areas they could improve?

I know there were at the time, but I blocked them out of my memory.

Do you have any advice for potential customers?

You just have to work at it to really make sure you are aligned on the scope and that you have established really good systems for communicating so that you can course-correct in a really agile way.

Introduce your business and what you do there. 

I’m the CIO for Bayada, a home health care company. We’re an international organization operating in 26 states and six countries. We provide care in people's homes.

What challenge were you trying to address with Think Company? 

We've had two engagements with Think Company. We first hired them to do research and analysis around designing a mobile portal for our employees.

What was the scope of their involvement?

Think Company interviewed about 50 frontline employees and office employees. They designed a mobile portal for us called The Front Door, which we implemented last year. The second project is designing our enterprise-wide IT strategy. They've been doing research and analysis for about nine months and will continue for another six months.

They're performing capabilities assessments of each of our business units and our enterprise shared services support areas. Next, they synthesize that information to identify themes and strategic capabilities for the company. Once that’s done, we'll move on to the next phase where they'll design our actual IT vision and strategic objectives to support our five-year IT strategy. 

What is the team composition?

Tom (Vice President of Client Engagement, Think Company) is our main point of contact. We worked with 4–5 people on the first project, and three in the current project.

How did you come to work with Think Company?

I interviewed several companies. Think Company’s attention to detail and their design approach made them stand out. I really appreciated that they had a realistic picture of how our work was performed. Tom and I hit it off because he’s realistic and speaks in plain language. They understand that doing good design work requires listening carefully in order to understand intent. 

How much have you invested with them?

We’ve spent approximately $250,000.

What is the status of this engagement? 

Work started in the second quarter of 2018 and the engagement is ongoing.

What evidence can you share that demonstrates the impact of the engagement?

The Front Door mobile portal was very successful and received extremely well by our company. Employee satisfaction has improved since its launch. As part of the IT analysis, they’ve identified the technology project work that’s necessary in order to achieve our enterprise-wide IT strategy. To date, that project is meeting our expectations. We've seen small improvements along the way that already improve revenue or reduce expenses. 

How did Think Company perform from a project management standpoint?

Their team is very good. Their project management has been excellent. They keep me on my toes and keep the project running smoothly. Think Company is able to quickly evaluate when things are off course. They also know when to speed things up or when to slow things down. I don't need to ask for anything. They stay ahead of me, which is really helpful. I have a big job and I can't do their work, too. 

We have a lot of meetings and do a lot of video conferences. We use email probably the least. I have a standing video conference with them every Monday afternoon and we often speak again toward the end of the week. When we have meetings with the leaders of our company, we'll do those in person or over Zoom video conference. 

What did you find most impressive about them? 

Think Company's ability to consume information, analyze it, and find original themes is so impressive. They make incredible insights about our company, our employees, and our technological capabilities that we’ve not observed ourselves. 

Are there any areas they could improve? 

No, not right now. They're doing exactly what we need them to do. 

Do you have any advice for potential customers? 

Think Company will cut through all of the buzzwords and lingo and perform solid research and analysis. They see through all the flowery stuff by being great listeners. They’ll find the insights that you may not find on your own.

Introduce your business and what you do there.

I’m the agile transformation leader for a pharmaceutical company. I’m mainly in charge of customer experience and digital transformation. 

What challenge were you trying to address with Think Company?

We wanted to revamp the customer experience for one of our primary customer sets that’s significant to our business. We needed a partner to work on our design strategy, UX/UI, and content and product strategy.

What was the scope of their involvement?

They work in HTML5, writing the code bases that they then gave to our internal production teams. They had to learn our content management system (CMS), Tridium, and do design work in Illustrator, InVision, and Photoshop. Think Company redefined the relationship that we want to have with our customers in our online channels and changed the focus from marketing and promotions to enhancing customer engagement. They helped us understand the customer journey, including their wants, needs, dreams, and vision. 

From there, they designed our content strategy, UI, and site layout. Essentially, they built the roadmap to our design, and our individual brands created the content that adhered to those guidelines. We developed an integrated system that delivers a cohesive brand.

What is the team composition? 

We worked with about 10–15 people, including an account executive, project manager, UX leader, content management specialist, and graphic designer.

How did you come to work with Think Company?

We sent out an RFP and considered 12 partners. Think Company had extensive work in customer experience and an evidence-based approach to problem-solving, so we hired them.

What is the status of this engagement?

We partnered in April 2017, and the work is ongoing. 

What evidence can you share that demonstrates the impact of the engagement?

They reduced our cycle time for content creation and deployment by more than 60%. We’ve also reduced the need to engage with other partners, which has decreased both the time and cost of our projects. New customer behaviors are aligning with the expectations of our customer experience strategy. Our Google index went from low to industry-leading categories.

What did you find most impressive about them?

Their evidence-based approach to solutions is fantastic, and they work hard to understand our end customers’ journeys. They’re willing to challenge or defend certain ideas, even being willing to walk away from work if they don’t think it’s a good fit for them.

Are there any areas they could improve?

No. We have lots of processes and procedures, and they’ve adjusted well to that.

Do you have any advice for future clients of theirs?

You need to be willing and able to accept their recommendations; they may suggest things that you didn’t think needed to be changed.

Introduce your business and what you do there.

I’m the VP of tech and product development for a company that provides an interactive mapping application. People use the product to put geographic data on top of an interactive map to get area information such as the census tract, zip code, or county. Users typically analyze neighborhood and geographic trends to inform policy-making decisions.

What challenge were you trying to address with Think Company?

We initially needed a partner to redesign our website’s interface.

What was the scope of their involvement?

For their first project, Think Company upgraded the underlying technology of our mapping platform to improve the interface, refresh the layout and, make it mobile friendly. The redesign was recently finished and is currently being implemented.

From there, we had them develop pattern libraries or build kits, which are CSS and HTML libraries that support the interface component that they designed. They also helped us migrate onto a new software workflow tool and identify best practices for how to populate it. They’re currently in more of a consulting role.

What is the team composition?

We’ve worked with a project manager the whole time, but the core team changes depending on the task. In the first phase, we had two designers, but now we have a tech lead and developer. There's been a minimum of three people in each phase.

How did you come to work with Think Company?

A former employee recommended them. They’re actually in the same building as us, so they pitched their idea, and we thought they were a good fit. They were on the higher end of our budget, but we felt the price was justified given the level of professionalism and expertise we received.

How much have you invested with them?

We’ve spent between $200,000–$900,000.

What is the status of this engagement?

We’ve been working together since February 2018.

What evidence can you share that demonstrates the impact of the engagement?

The first phase was a fairly ambitious project, but they finished it within four months and under budget. Their pattern libraries provide tremendous value, saving us time and tedious amounts of work. In their new consulting role, they help us make quick decisions that expedite almost any tech decision we have to make.

How did Think Company perform from a project management standpoint?

We meet weekly with the project manager, and she sends out regular status and budget updates. When we have additional requests outside of the regular work week, she accommodates to needs. We communicate through various tools, including email, Jira, Slack, and Basecamp.

What did you find most impressive about them?

We understand our user base fairly well, so Think Company was willing to skip the research phase and jump right into development and design. They accommodated our unique circumstance and business model, which we appreciated. The entire team is smart and willing to customize their service to best meet our wishes. Also, the designers were extremely talented and produced high-quality work.

Are there any areas they could improve?

No, we've been happy.

Do you have any advice for future clients of theirs?

Be honest with them and provide detailed information on your goals, weaknesses, and expectations. They won’t judge you, and it’ll result in a stronger partnership. Be as thorough as possible, and they’ll do great work.

Introduce your business and what you do there.

I’m the head of product management at Proactis. We provide B2B software as a SaaS for purchasing organizations to buy items for their company.

What challenge were you trying to address with Think Company?

My former organization hired Think Company before being acquired by Proactis. Initially, we engaged with Think Company to get quotes for modernizing our e-commerce application’s look and feel. We wanted to improve customer satisfaction, enhance usability, and acquire new clients more easily.

What was the scope of their involvement?

The engagement was end-to-end in scope. Our team presented the app’s core areas and our objectives for them; we recorded the demonstration for their reference. Initially, Think Company researched and identified personas of the users, buyers, and app administrators. We gave them customer contacts to set up meetings with current and potential clients. Think Company then evaluated how those stakeholders use the apps and fit into the determined personas.

The team recorded their observations on a daily basis and used the information to design wireframes. Next, Think Company asked the same customers to click through those interactive wireframes and provide UX feedback or possible changes. Concurrently, they had a separate art design team do the skinning, which included new colors, animations, and shapes.

They staggered those deliverables through our internal approval and A/B testing processes. As the final deliverable, Think Company provided a complete build kit of all the screens marked up into the new UI. They also presented sample HTML, code, and stylesheets.

What is the team composition?

I worked with a project manager and the VP of client engagement, who served as the salesperson for my account.

How did you come to work with Think Company?

I knew the VP of client engagement from another company. We were connected on LinkedIn after the first partnership and I asked if he wanted to be involved in an RFP for a new UI. After evaluating several providers, they were selected.

How much have you invested with them?

We spent approximately $250,000.

What is the status of this engagement?

We worked with them from June-November 2016.

What evidence can you share that demonstrates the impact of the engagement?

We don’t have metrics yet because the new interface product launch is still underway. In addition, our sales are complex and take up to 10 months. Consequently, we won’t know this project’s impact for another year.

How did Think Company perform from a project management standpoint?

They had a main project manager and individual leads for each area, such as design. The leads were in-step with each other, which made the partnership easy for us. The team always asked permission before executing each change. We use Basecamp for document sharing between their development team and our steering team. Although we used messaging and email, we logged those interactions in Basecamp.

What did you find most impressive about them?

Their well-defined process kept us informed and deliverables on schedule. In addition, they had a wide range of expertise and resources to leverage—usability experts, project managers, frontend developers, and psychologists. Pooling that talent provided comprehensive organizational support for the product’s various components.

Are there any areas they could improve?

Nothing from a product standpoint, but they needed to document design justification more thoroughly. Given the project’s nature, I had to move certain design aspects forward without a record for how those components fit with other project decisions, user conversations, and best practices. However, I also could have also taken better notes.

Introduce your business and what you do there.

We are a transactional printing company that also electronically renders printed documents, mostly for the community banking industry. I am the product manager for the electronic rendering tool specifically, rendering printed statements into electronic statements. I manage product pricing, the whole product lifecycle, our development and scrum teams, and the design elements and feature releases.

What challenge were you trying to address with Think Company?

We launched a product in 2010 and hadn’t done any major upgrades to it for 5 or 6 years. We wanted to modernize the product to make it more usable and upgrade the platform for better scalability, as we now have a lot more customers than we did in 2010. We also needed a couple of new features to be designed and implemented in a new tool. 

What was the scope of their involvement?

The entire lifecycle of a project includes the planning, high-level design, detail of the design, development, implementation, and rollout. Think Company was really involved in the high-level design. They took the legacy application, did their analysis, and came up with personas, which was a deliverable for which we were designing the tool. They completed all the research and created a high-level design of what the new application was going to look like. This included new information architecture, some of the new visual design elements, 10 unique screens, and all the different interactions of those screens. It was a collaborative effort for long stretches of time. We collaborated, they got feedback from us, and then they’d go back to the drawing board.

For deliverables, they sent the personas, the requirements for the personas, the actual interaction design, the visual design, and the story requirements for the interaction design. They were not involved in the implementation of the design at all. This solution is a white-label product, and around 80 customers use it. It is the same core product that visually looks different for each customer.

What is the team dynamic?

We worked with 5 members of their team, including a project manager, relationship manager, lead designer, and junior designer, and visual designer. Throughout the project, it was clear who was working on which aspect and responsible for each deliverable.

How did you come to work with Think Company?

My superior had an indirect relationship with Think Company via his spouse and already had some familiarity with the type of work they do. After personally researching them online, I reached out to them, and the onboarding process was pretty easy from there.

I did research other firms at the time, and I chose Think Company mostly because of their vicinity, as I knew we would be able to get people on-site, and their cost was reasonable compared to their primary competitors.

How much have you invested in them?

We spent around $200,000 with Think Company.

What is the status of this engagement?

We started working together in December 2016, and the final deliverables came at the end of April 2017. 

What evidence can you share that demonstrates the impact of the engagement?

We haven’t gone live with the product at this point, as we are still in the development phase, so it is hard to quantify. However, we did put a PowerPoint together of some of the visual design elements and features they provided based on the research that we did. This pretty much closed the deal with our customer. The deal was a significant amount of money—multiple times what we paid Think Company—and we have already recouped the investment cost. The images they provided and the research they completed ultimately helped us win that sale.

We’ve definitely noticed benefits. Their work helped people realize that we are trying to modernize our platforms and are transforming our business by using outside help.

How did Think Company perform from a project management standpoint?

Think Company did some things really well, and other things they could improve. Overall, they created a sense of transparency through weekly status updates, and they escalated anything that needed to be. But, the deliverables were not properly defined at the onset of the engagement, which created some scoping and budget issues as the project progressed.

From a project management perspective, the deliverables could have been better outlined, as we had to expend extra effort to get requirements from them. That created a gap since they didn’t think they needed to give us the requirements, which was slightly alarming. However, what they gave us was good, but I had no traceability to the research.

There was a lack of visibility in terms of my feedback and how that feedback was integrated into the final deliverables. They shared the wireframes via InVision; however, there was no tracking of the comments I made in InVision. After 5 iterations, I couldn’t tell which comments were cleared, ignored, or integrated into the new design. I wanted to have full tracking.

What did you find most impressive about them?

The main differentiator for Think Company was their build kit. They do a good job as a design firm, but they also have the right IT resources to deliver a great technical solution. Their depth of design expertise and heavy IT component make them stand out. They have a ton of designers on the team who gave excellent feedback on tough design questions.

Are there any areas they could improve?

I would have liked to see the engagement accelerate more quickly.