Building products that help people think, work, and play.

We build human-first products that treat the human side as seriously as the technical side. Interfaces that feel conversational, systems that explain their reasoning, and technology that fits into how people actually work rather than forcing them to adapt. For over 20 years, we've worked with teams at Google, IBM, Air New Zealand, Kpler, EE, News UK, Tesco, and The Economist, sitting in the space between product strategy and hands-on engineering, designing systems and shipping products that make the complex feel simple.

If you're building products and need help with the human side of the engineering, get in touch at hello@thingsthat.com or book a call.

Mass Vision is a persona-based video sentiment tool: a synthetic screening room for ads. You upload a film, synthetic personas watch it, and narrate reactions moment by moment, explaining why, tied to identity, lived experience, ethics, and context. The output is a tension map (not a safe average): where the same scene splits audiences, who feels seen, and who feels repelled. The Christmas ads analysis shows why this matters: social sentiment gave broad takes after launch; Mass Vision shows the segment mechanics underneath, at specific moments. Run it in minutes, iterate while changes are still cheap, and stop learning the hard way in public.

My mum thinks it's cool. My friends think it's as odd as a cat with wings. Getting human opinion is hard. It's time-consuming, expensive, and we're not sure we can trust the result. That's why we built Mass, a platform to deploy hundreds of synthetic human personas that think, reason, and respond like the target audience. They're brutally honest and unfiltered, giving a real sense of what audiences wants in minutes, not months. And at a fraction of the cost. Understand perspectives, validate messaging, explore positioning, and more before committing to the real human research.