We build products that succeed

Who are we?

Thought Driven Development is a remote-first web and mobile software development consultancy based in the United States.

Our singular focus is to achieve radical results for our non-profit, commercial and academic clients.

We love technology, but we love people more. Our mission is to use technology as a means to helping people, not as an end in itself.

We think hard about how to deeply serve our clients and their customers, and accept only those for whom we feel we can make an impact.

What do we do?

Our secret sauce is that we put people, not technology, at the center of our concerns.

We begin by carefully listening to clients and their customers, empathizing with their pains, fears, hopes and dreams. This allows us to generate a definition of success in human terms and then to translate that to trackable metrics. Once we know what success looks like, we can "work backwards to the technology," proposing elegant, creative solutions and iterating toward them—delivering value early and often.

CASE STUDY

University of Chicago

We were selected by professor Steven Levitt, co-author of New York Times Bestseller "Freakonomics," to work with an innovation lab dedicated to finding unorthodox solutions to difficult social problems.

Our service oriented architecture performs real-time analysis on trillions of events annually.

CASE STUDY

IBM

We worked with the legendary technology brand to build a series of elevated lead-generation assessments.

CASE STUDY

Vital City

Working with Design For Progress, we developed the software and workflows that allowed them to launch a new digital publication, Vital City, focused on criminal justice reform in New York City.

We also worked with them to develop an interactive digital art-piece that teaches people about the history of gun violence in New York.

Thought Driven Developer

Think we can help?

We build software from scratch or fix existing software. We specialize in augmentation and leadership for distributed development teams.

How do we do it?

We've been given the challenge of putting ourselves in the shoes of myriad different folks, ranging from prisoners to soccer moms, from high-powered executives to purchasers of men's underwear.

Serving and solving doesn't always mean using the most sophisticated technological tools available. In fact, we're suspicious of solutions that take a long time and introduce complexity—we are extremely careful to spend our time working on the right problems.

We carefully research and choose our tools based on the needs of the project, not what's trendy. That said, here are some of the tools we've come to love:

Languages

  • Elixir
  • Golang
  • GraphQL
  • Javascript
  • Ruby

Libraries / Frameworks

  • Phoenix for Elixir
  • React
  • Ruby on Rails
  • Typescript
  • VueJS

Processes / Philosophies

  • Agile / XP
  • Product design sprint
  • Human centered design