Designing and building creative intelligence products and brands for humans
We build human-first products that treat the human side as seriously as the technical side. Interfaces that are conversational, systems that explain their reasoning, and AI technology that fits into how people actually work rather than forcing them to adapt.
For over 20 years, we've solving problems alongside 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.
Since 2017 we've worked freelance helping teams as hands-on engineers and consultants, and as interim CTO. The last five years have been mostly AI, working in consumer intelligence, research, and media creation and distribution. That's meant building insight tools, agents, and gen UI copilots on top of messy data. Alongside this, we released several products, including Mass, a way to simulate human feedback at scale. More recently we've been working with London-based agencies on AI engineering workflows and platform development.
Insight and strategy
Decoding the behaviours and tensions shaping how people use AI products, tools, and brands. Then a clear recommendation: positioning, product direction, or the next thing to ship.
On the technical side that usually means framing the commercial case for an AI surface before the build, mapping what can stay local versus what needs the cloud, and stress-testing ideas against grounded feedback so the team ships the right thing, not another demo.
Product design and engineering
Designing the interface and writing the code that makes it happen. This is the core of our fractional consultancy work, and what we do every day.
Web products in Vue, Nuxt, and TypeScript, with GraphQL or REST APIs, PostgreSQL, and Redis where the product needs it. Data-heavy front ends for analysts and operators: interactive tables, timelines, charts, and schema-driven generative UI that turns structured data into screens people can act on. Cloud and delivery on AWS or GCP with Terraform, CI/CD, and the reliability work (latency, observability, security) so the product survives the week after launch. Desktop and local-first when the job needs it: Electron, Rust layers, SQLite, on-device search and enrichment, with cloud only for the heavy jobs.
Thinking machines
How people talk to it, how it reasons, how it fails, and how it stays in production. Not just designing the interface, but engineering products that make inference trustworthy.
Agentic systems with LangGraph-style orchestration: multi-step reasoning, recovery, tool use, and stateful workflows people can interrupt. Multi-provider LLM routing across Gemini, Claude, GPT, and open models, with fallbacks, evaluation, and observability so model behaviour is measurable. Conversational layers over complex data: copilots, synthesis tools, and generative UI engines that keep a person in the loop. AI-native delivery for the team itself: Cursor and Claude Code paired with design tools, component libraries with AI parts, and habits that land in the repo rather than slides.
Work with us
Alongside our product work, we do 1:1 pair sessions and workshops for teams and individuals in the industry. We work with product engineers, designers and solo founders who want to get more out of their AI tools, and with teams that need a fractional design+build partner.
Fractional design + build
We join your team in-house or remote and do the job alongside you. From designing the product to building it and then shipping it to production.
Team workshop
Hands-on workshops for teams adopting tools like Claude, Cursor, and ChatGPT. With over 20 years' experience in engineering and design, we've put our knowledge into courses that work.
Pair session
Maybe you're working on a product, but you're stuck on how to make it live. Or you're still in the design phase, and want to make actual progress. We work together to go live.
Let's talk
If you're building a product and you need the human side of the engineering as well as the system, tell us what you're building and which services you need. Either reach out by email or feel free to book some of our time on our calendar.
hello@thingsthat.comWe're always honest about what we can and can't do. If we're not the right people for it, we'll tell you straight up. We have a large network of incredible designers, engineers and innovators, so if we're not the people, we'll know someone who is.