Reinvesting in Echobind

Laptops are for laps.

In September of last year, we wrote a post titled Investing in Echobind that touched on all the rad ways our agency was expanding. Even then, we didn’t anticipate the rapid growth and exciting opportunities that were on our horizon. In a year, our team more than doubled in size. We’ve made a number of new engineering hires, continued to build our creative offering, and adopted new tech to better assist our clients.

New Hires

We’re thrilled to have added eleven amazing people to our team since the start of the year. The positions include engineers, designers, strategists, and operations (our first internal hire!)

• Anne Tolmie, Account Manager
• Deen Denno, Software Engineer
• Gabriel Martin, Associate Engineer
• Glenn Hayes, Senior Account Manager
• Jenn Robison, Senior Software Engineer
• Joe Previte, Software Engineer
• Josh Buchea, Software Engineer
• Kory Tegman, Senior Software Engineer
• Michael Dang, Designer
• Mike Cavaliere, Senior Software Engineer
• Sarah Case, Director of Operations

Creative Expansion

Much of our growth has been fueled by our clients’ need for more sophisticated mobile applications. These apps that fit in your hand extend what our team has been doing with web apps and APIs since our inception.

Folks building their first mobile app don’t often realize that mobile apps almost always need a supporting web app. These supporting web apps may be for administrators to surface and manage user data or serve as a means for mobile subscriptions that don’t incur app store costs.

Because of this, our mobile work led us down the path of bringing more of our creative offerings in house. Today, we’re happy to say that in addition to crafting beautiful and functional designs, we’re spending almost as much time planning our applications as we are engineering them.

This work has lead us to solve problems earlier in the development cycle and reduces the complexity of our projects so that they ship sooner and with fewer bugs. (We’ve even helped some clients realize that they should go back to the drawing board before continuing a project since we didn’t see a clear to an ROI!)

We’ve been fortunate to work with clients in the following areas:

• Application Audits
• Product Discovery
• Design Sprints
• User Experience Interviews and Mapping
• Continuous Digital Strategy

Our investment in our creative work is ongoing. We’re exploring new partnerships and opening several full-time positions in the coming year. Stay tuned!

Hello, Chatbots

We give our team the ability to spend time each week investing in their personal goals that align with our goals as a company. With this investment time, our team gains relevant skills that help current and future client requests. We experiment with unvetted technologies by learning the ins and outs before we sell it as a service.

A byproduct of this investment time is our ability to strategize and develop functional chatbots. Over the last year, we’ve worked closely with two of our healthcare clients to round out our skills and build company processes and checklists to accelerate future development.

We despise buzzwords, so to be clear, we consider chatbots to be software that listens to your users and responds reliably. Mike Cavaliere has lead our company’s internal research over the last year, and we’ve had the opportunity to develop and work with our clients on the following:

• Deterministic conversational interfaces that are web, mobile, and API-driven
• Content management systems that allow for our clients to update their messaging
• Visualization tools to view and triage specific conversation branches

We’ll continue working with clients on chatbots this year regardless of whether the chatbot is a single feature or the app’s core feature.

Summit 2019

It’s time for our annual company summit. We’re happy to announce we are headed to sunny San Diego to spend five days leveling up our strategic skills and collaborating to build several products that we hope will make our team more efficient.

Summit is a time to remove ourselves from the day-to-day, come together as a team, and challenge ourselves to sharpen the saw. It’s also the start of how we set the tone for the new year, both in terms of how we want to grow the company and recommitting to what we want our company culture to be. We look forward to sharing what we’ve learned (and likely some epic surf pics) when we return!