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What does it mean to have a great team? How to make good teams cross over into great territory? Working together is more than just doing the work.

Over the years of delivering working software we have carefully carved a pathway to how we do our best work. Many of these habits and workflows resemble agile methodologies very closely, while others were more ideas that evolved from traditional agile approaches. Like any successful project, our approach is also expected to grow and iterate over time. The following is a representation of how we are currently working together to build software products.

Building usable software is about understanding your users' mental models and how they interact with your product. That’s where usability testing comes in. Whether you're building a new feature or redesigning an entire product, usability testing is one of the most powerful tools in a user researcher’s tool box to ensure your team is heading in the right direction.

Associations, colleges, and even telecommunications providers often have member-facing portals which collect information from a wide variety of systems and allow those members to make changes to that information (e.g. by adding a new subscription). Ideally, all of the details of that change are immediately available to the member throughout the portal and any 3rd party they may be redirected to. For example, if their new subscription gives them access to a research platform, they expect to see a new link to that platform show up, and give them the access they paid for.

At Engage, we believe that great software isn’t just built, it’s refined. One of the key practices in our workflow is the retrospective, a dedicated time for teams to reflect on what worked, what didn’t, and how to improve. But what exactly is a retrospective, and why does it matter to our teams and clients?