A collection of stories and thoughts from the craft focused teams of Umbrage Studios. Latest June 27, 2022 Helping Your Customers Breathe a Little Easier It starts with a relationship. No matter the problem, the solution we’re building or the product we're reworking, we put our working relationship with our clients front and center in every interaction. It’s a crucial part in how we’ve continued to win contracts, even against odds. In
May 25, 2022 Define & Design Define & Design is a key part of our methodology. We believe that solutions should be validated rather than arbitrary project goals, which means that we have to get to the core of what’s going on. We’re not just treating symptoms — we’re tracking down the root issue(
March 14, 2022 Heralds of Change in the American Workplace Culture "Change or die." It was the business author Alan Deutschman who said so simply what the risk of refusing change was. What is the cost of change? Or more relevantly, what is the cost of complacency for a business? The cost of change is a more daunting option initially. We
February 22, 2022 Reflecting on the Tired Existence of the American Worker: A Series Self-starter. Works long hours. Sacrifices personal time in order to ensure company objectives are met. Willing to wear many hats. The summary above reads like a standard job description. It even sounds eerily similar to how I’ve described myself in interviews. It’s from an article published in the
December 20, 2021 The Industrialization of Design 94% of first impressions are based on design. We all know that first impressions matter but in business, they’re even more crucial. You might get a second or even third chance to change others’ opinions of you if you’ve met someone in person. In business, we know that
November 16, 2021 Pushing Back On Gatekeeping At Umbrage, we've never bought into gatekeeping as a business model. But in a market where custom solutions are increasingly becoming standard, how do we stay competitive?
October 13, 2021 Reducing Risk and Moving Fast (Enterprise Product Development) Software startups routinely live by the mantra of “fail fast.” They want to quickly validate an idea or a feature. But the enterprise has historically moved much slower with a less risky, "bolt on" approach, leveraging existing solutions rather than building its own. When it comes to building new products
September 15, 2021 How to Optimize Your Time to Development I have been invited to present at the upcoming DevOpsDays Houston on Optimizing Time to First Deployment. Creating scalable, efficient and effective processes are imperative to the start of a software development project. From the initial decisions around which frameworks to utilize to how to host and roll out a
September 9, 2021 Three Ways to Scale a Collaborative Product Development Process Everything you’ve worked toward is coming to fruition. The scope of work is signed and now it’s time for the real work to begin. While each product that your team develops is unique, not all work needs to be replicated. Major VARs and larger consultancies are focused on
July 20, 2021 Designing Beyond the Screen Contrary to some beliefs, the design process does not start with building designs. In actuality, designing a finished product is a holistic affair that involves an examination of not only the user’s workflow, but also the environment in which they are working. To design beyond the screen is to
July 16, 2021 Come see Umbrage at DevOpsDays Houston Umbrage is a Houston business. We are based in Houston, hire people that grew up in Houston and work with Houston-based companies. We understand Houston Strong. And now we have an opportunity to step out into the community and shine a spotlight on the software development industry and in town.
July 13, 2021 Are You a Software Wizard or Barbarian? Every software engineer reaches a point in their career where they begin to lean towards one of two problem-solving paradigms, one called a wizard, and another called a barbarian. Wizards tend to take their time solving issues, leading to slow code delivery and missed deadlines. Barbarians like to brute force
June 22, 2021 The Software Solutions Your Company Needs Now Enterprise software has long been regarded as a second-class option. Knocked as hard to use and difficult to integrate into other workflows, it wasn’t until recently that software developers began to actually emphasize the user experience. Enterprise users began forcing corporations to adopt software solutions through a shadow IT
June 10, 2021 What We Wish Our Clients Knew About DevOps Enterprise companies routinely fall into a cycle of relying on engineers to build a user-facing product only to become frustrated when the end users are unhappy with the product and refuse to use it. By prioritizing DevOps and infrastructure at the very beginning of the product cycle, your team can
June 3, 2021 Getting Dev Ready Kicking off a software project successfully is no small feat. At Umbrage, we really strive to set the tone for success before the development work even begins. We make sure we have the right people in the room and that we utilize the right types of research to align on
May 25, 2021 Taking the First Step Together In our first post, we discussed how to assemble the correct project team to ensure a successful delivery. Once all the right people are together, it’s time to put them in the room and get the project underway. For us, that begins with a kickoff meeting. Setting the kickoff
May 14, 2021 You've Signed the SOW, Now What? The signatures on the contract are fresh and now it’s time for the real work to begin. But before your team starts moving cards in Jira or ADO, there’s some groundwork to do to ensure the project is set up for success. The iterative software product development process
April 8, 2021 Industrialize Your MVP: Why your product team can’t please their users The enterprise excels at making first drafts. But enterprise companies routinely fall short at improving on that initial version and adding true value to their users. At Umbrage, part of the value we deliver to our clients is creating a product-first vision that enables them to industrialize their initial products.
March 23, 2021 It’s Time to Deliver Today is a special day at Umbrage, and a major milestone. We are excited to announce that we have closed our seed round of funding. You can read the official press release here, but I wanted to take a few moments to reflect on the journey so far. On a
March 22, 2021 We Are Umbrage Umbrage is a legion of creatives united by a passion to design, develop and deliver consumer-quality digital solutions and experiences to the enterprise and we wanted to take a moment to introduce ourselves. Design ThinkingNot long ago, the enterprise was told it needed to be more “user-centric” when contemplating a
