As one of the original founders of Philosophie, the Design & Innovation studio acquired by InfoBeans in 2019, I am proud to share the exciting news of our new team name – InfoBeans Accelerate.

Just as the last 3 years have demonstrated, we will continue to serve our team and clients the same way we always have, but with even more global strength and skill.

Skot and I originally named the company Philosophie in 2008 based on the line “All work is an act of philosophy”. We used that phrase as a colophon across the web in the early days. … Read More

If you’re following current trends in Product Management, it seems that everyone is talking about being customer-led, using design thinking techniques and acting with an experimental mindset. If you work in a heavily regulated industry, such as financial services, insurance or healthcare, you may be wondering how you can take advantage of these ideas without being shut down by your colleagues in legal and compliance.

Many large companies that want to innovate are stuck in the old ways of making products: plan, build, ship, and hope for the big payoff—but what if the payoff doesn’t happen? You could easily spend … Read More

There is so much waste in enterprise software. Teams build and build. And build. And build. But when they finally release, the product often falls flat. No one should be surprised by the fact that the vast majority of custom software development projects ($440 billion in 2019 alone!) fail

Agile — and now SAFe promised a better approach to building software — but unfortunately these processes, which have helped deliver a lot of features didn’t result in better products. What if instead of measuring how many features you are able to crank out, you looked at what would have the … Read More

While working with a top strategy firm and a major German Healthcare company building the healthcare product Fern Health, we engineered a solution that solved several challenges often encountered in health tech. This product is used by multiple users with different needs and requires data from several different healthcare-compliant data sources.

Early on in our Experiment-Driven Design process, it became apparent that we were solving problems for more than just a single user. The system was predicated on a system of complex interactions between health care providers, the patient, their caregivers, healthcare advisors, etc. This is a common trend … Read More

Getting enterprises to embrace a culture of experimentation is a tremendous challenge. The rising popularity of scaled agile frameworks (SAFe), while intended to increase visibility and communication, often creates more overhead without increasing leadership’s confidence that teams are delivering the right results. The most successful product teams realize that change is inevitable, and their teams will deliver their best work if, instead of focusing on plans, they define clear outcomes and metrics, ruthlessly prioritize work, and take an iterative approach.

One of the biggest hurdles is helping executives understand what teams are working on and the value they … Read More

So, whether you like it or not, your whole team is now remote — welcome to the new normal! We know how hard this is, especially for companies that work primarily co-located, because we went through this exact transition a few years ago. The success of our projects, both internal and client-based are heavily dependent on our ability to effectively facilitate collaborative brainstorming with multiple stakeholders, and, more importantly, rapidly reach agreement on key decisions. Whether in design critiques, ideation sessions, or meetings devoted to evaluating solutions, we needed a way to ensure everyone was heard, and that decisions were … Read More

Philosophie’s purpose is to create meaningful software. Software that people enjoy using. Software that gets real results for our clients. We’re not very tolerant of waste. We don’t like our clients to waste their money, time, and talent pursuing an idea that might not work out. Because of this, we put a lot of emphasis on validating ideas as we go.

One of my primary tools in validating new software ideas is the concept of Minimum Viable Product. When I talk about MVP, I’m thinking of the definition Eric Ries gives it in The Lean Startup: that version of a new … Read More

The full version of this blog post originally appeared on UX Collective’s Medium on March 2, 2017. It has been edited slightly.

It is clear that intelligent algorithms such as deep learning, machine learning, artificial intelligence, etc. will have a major impact on the world. However, what isn’t clear is how these technologies can be used to solve real problems for people.

Patrick, your friendly robot helper, as designed by my amazing teammates at Philosophie, Jamie, and Leah.

At Philosophie we work on experiences that help humans in their day-to-day tasks. We hope to join the … Read More

Building great and useful software is hard. Doing it within the enterprise comes with its own unique set of challenges. When there are an endless number of potential landmines, how can we maximize our chance of survival and success? These challenges are exacerbated because the people controlling the purse strings often have different goals from the people we are building the software for.

It would be nice to believe that we could simply follow the principles of Human-Centered Design and focus exclusively on the pain points of our users, we need to understand the environment we are designing within. Critically, … Read More

Often times, when a new exciting technology comes out, we quickly start to think of all of the amazing things we can build with the new tool. Entrepreneurs come out of the woodwork and race to build new solutions to problems that may or may not exist yet.

Blockchain is an exciting technology revolution that will transform how we do business forever. However, it is just that, a technology, and technologies alone are not a product. Philosophie by InfoBeans has been active in the blockchain ecosystem for the past 5+ years. We started designing and building products that use blockchain … Read More