About Note Fifteen
Who we are – A digital strategy, product design, and software development firm.
What we do – We help brands build products and services for the digital economy. We strive to help define and deliver enduring products and services. In short, we build what you need to grow your business.
Why we exist – You are busy running and scaling your existing business by serving your current customers better every single day. This requires a consistent and urgent focus on the tactical.
We help you take a leap forward to meet your strategic goals, defining and delivering the next generation of products and services to ensure you become or remain a market leader.
What we won’t do – We don’t like to copy or develop slight variations on what exists. We prefer to develop things that will change your business in dramatic ways.
How we do what we do
We use great talent – Every project is led by a principal member. This leader is engaged in the day to day leadership of the team, and even creates deliverables. We employ only the best of the best in strategy, engineering, product, and design.
We study customers deeply – We use empathy on our journey to find fundamental insights. This allows us to define solutions to unmet and unarticulated needs of customers.
We thoughtfully architect whole systems then quickly test and iterate – we work backward from the ideal state for the customer, then we approach the hardest or most unknown parts first, to de-risk the project and deliver value quickly.
We don’t believe lean startup methods were meant to mean blindly “test and learn”. Instead, we think it’s wise to design the whole thing thoughtfully, then pick the hardest/riskiest parts, test and iterate – For example, if you were tasked with building a bridge, would you “test and learn” with what you know right now, then later discover that support columns improve stability? Obviously no. You would hire the best experts in bridge building: structural engineering, metallurgy, wind engineering, seismic design, marine, geotechnics, architecture, and more. They would architect the whole system, then quickly develop tests to solve the hardest parts. Only then, would they embark at building at scale.
We build things for ourselves – Many agencies just “consult” in a vacuum. We actually build products, services, and entire startups for ourselves. We think scaled businesses are important to ensure we maintain deep empathy for our clients and also keep our execution abilities razor sharp.
How we organize – We think collaboration, cooperation, and coordination will allow small independent teams to accomplish new amazing things.
We value ideas using a simple 3 part formula: 1) Does it address a huge problem or opportunity space. 2) Is the solution radical enough to provide an enduring advantage 3) Does the technology exist that is relatively feasible. (Bottom line, we prefer not to work on ideas that are frivolous, small-bore, or impossible to execute)