Expanding headquarters
We have big plans for the new year. A new Chicago office location, expanded services and capabilities, more research, and updates to our Sourcery Academy are just a few things in store. Read on for more details on what we have planned this year and the decade to come.
Devbridge is expanding its Chicago footprint by relocating to larger offices at 350 N. Orleans Street. Slated to open in early March, the newly built, expansive 25,000 square foot location is twice the size of our current facility and capable of accommodating up to 140 employees. Our offices in London, Toronto, Chicago, Kaunas, and Vilnius all have capacity to accommodate growth. We anticipate growing from the current size of 500 to 900 employees in the next couple of years. This expansion signifies our overall position on market outlook and technology opportunities we see for our continued commitment servicing clients in financial services, healthcare, hospitality, industrial supply, logistics, and transportation.
New services and capabilities
We’ve successfully developed and applied service design with several of our clients. Service design helps organizations map out a specific service across all internal and external touchpoints, identify operational gaps and customer pain points, and distill areas where digitization increases operational efficiency or drives revenue. When utilized, the practice provides a holistic and deep understanding of existing business processes, dependencies, and opportunities. Once identified, the investment can be prioritized and measured using product analytics.
By implementing product analytics, we’ve further refined how to gauge adoption and customer success for new product investments. Using real data demonstrates real results. With tangible insights, teams are able to justify investment-to-date—as well as secure future funding, all without a long business case cycle.
Our team rolled out a new framework to gauge product and process maturity, called the Product Maturity Score. The score represents maturity in software engineering, product management, and product design. This information helps organizations a) upgrade a specific product to an advanced state, and b) establish criteria to adhere to for organizational transformation. Products with a higher score demonstrate higher throughput, faster go-to-market, and lower churn (e.g., QA costs, escaped defect count, etc.). In other words, more meaningful work gets done with less effort.
We’re investing in a new version of PowerUp, which provides product leaders with actionable product metrics and complete transparency into the development process. The next iteration will run inside of our client infrastructure, with internal teams and contributors—becoming the catalyst for process change and engineering maturity for our clients. A pilot program is underway. Contact us for more information.
Each month, we host a breakfast discussion designed especially for full-stack teams and product people at our Chicago office. Speakers present a talk featuring actionable insights on product-centric topics. You can sign up for the next Full Stack Friday or view replays of past events here.
Upcoming research
With over thirty cross-functional product teams, we have a healthy data set to analyze. We started assembling our learnings in monthly white papers. Here’s what we have scheduled for the first quarter:
Applied service design white paper. While UX is great, there’s more to creating and executing well designed impactful user experiences. Learn about this indispensable methodology—including how to’s and a case study detailing an implementation.
Refactoring legacy applications white paper. Our fair share of “rescue operations” of highly fragile legacy applications taught us how to manage these unique projects and deliver successful outcomes. Find out how to tackle old, difficult to maintain and scale software—as well as address relatively new, failing applications that crumble under accrued technical debt.
Product metrics white paper. A set of metrics shouldn’t introduce counter-productive behaviors. It should incentivize outcomes overactivity. See how a comprehensive framework of metrics are used to build healthy, self-governing product teams—plus how a set of metrics that applies both to an individual product and a $100M program portfolio.
Enhanced programs at Sourcery Academy
Sourcery Academy started years ago as a hands-on academy for college students looking to enter the software industry. Growing and healthy, the Academy has since expanded to encompass additional programs such as:
Sourcery for Kids. A nonprofit, free-to-attend program for kids ages seven to twelve. In 2019, 516 kids from a variety of backgrounds learned coding principles at seven locations. 2019 marked the third year of the program, which continues to expand and grow in 2020. We’re thrilled we can contribute to our community and influence future educational policy.
Sourcery for Product Professionals. A product academy in Chicago for experienced professionals looking to either up-skill their game or enter the product industry from disciplines such as project management, business analysis, user experience, and others. The spring class and call for applicants will be announced in February. Get notified.
Sourcery for Leaders. A new training program we’re offering our clients that are looking to start on a journey of transformation and need the skills to rearchitect funding, organizational structure, adopt best practices, and generally disrupt how work is being done. These are condensed, consultative sessions meant for senior executives to get to the essence quickly. Inquire to learn more.
