Articles by David Hendee

David Hendee

David Hendee

Carbon Five Turns 18: What We’ve Learned So Far

2000: what a year! Steve Ballmer became CEO of Microsoft, the PS2 had just come out, the first crew boarded the International Space Station, and Carbon Five was founded.

David Hendee

David Hendee

How to make an experience map

An experience map is a structured customer journey map that we use at Carbon Five to help identify challenges and opportunities within an existing (or imagined) experience. Since we use it so often – both when scoping projects and when kicking off major phases of work – we’d love to share a bit about what

David Hendee

David Hendee

Top Traits of Successful Non-technical Founders

As a digital product development consultancy that delivers more than 30 projects a year, we get to work with a lot of founders: technical and non-technical alike. Over the last 17 some-odd years, there are a few traits we see time and again in successful non-technical founders. And really, these six traits benefit anyone trying

David Hendee

David Hendee

Carbon Five + Cooper: Exploring Alexa & the Future of Voice UIs

Recently, designers and technologists from Cooper & Carbon Five sat down to brainstorm about the future of voice-driven user experiences, focusing initially on Alexa. It was a fun kickoff for what we hope turns into a series of prototypes and experiments exploring (and pushing) the boundaries of this exciting emerging technology. Here’s what we’ve discovered

David Hendee

David Hendee

Tech Consulting: 2016 Year in Review

As a consulting firm that’s been around for 17 years, Carbon Five has a unique perspective on trends in digital product development. In this post we look back on 2016 and reflect on what we’ve seen in the industry, and where we think it’s headed. Here are the the top five trends we saw in

David Hendee

David Hendee

Introducing Presto

Note: If you’re looking for information on Houdini or Toggle, you’re in the right spot. After changing the project name from Toggle to Houdini (for SEO reasons), we’ve switched again (there was another Houdini already). If you know of another language called “Presto” please let us know, we’ve got more names. At Carbon Five we

David Hendee

David Hendee

Blocked by Design? Get Into a Design Flow with Story Triage

In the years since we’ve been providing integrated design and development on agile teams, we’ve noticed something that seems to emerge naturally on projects that are going particularly well. While we always set out to design our products in small releases, refactoring along the way (i.e. “the smallest whole“), often designers find themselves quickly under

David Hendee

David Hendee

Spring Summit Diary

Last week all of Carbon Five converged on Santa Monica for our bi-annual Summit to talk, eat, and play together. The theme for this season’s summit was Mobile, but as expected some of the most interesting conversations ranged far afield: from the challenges and opportunities of integrating design on Agile teams, to silly employee origin stories,

David Hendee

David Hendee

Kablammo! The Ruby Robot War Has a Winner

At this year’s GoGaRuCo, we ran a coding contest called Kablammo. Contestants submitted robot strategies and their ‘bots fought it out in the arena at Kablammo.io for a chance to win a Printrbot Simple 3D printer. After more than 20 entries and 1,000 battles, we’re ready to announce the winner! Congratulations to Jeff Moore (AKA

David Hendee

David Hendee

Lean in the Enterprise: an Evening with Brant Cooper & Patrick Vlaskovits

Please join us at Carbon Five in San Francisco on Thursday, August 29th at 6:30pm for a special evening featuring Brant Cooper & Patrick Vlaskovits as they share their unique perspective on entrepreneurship in the enterprise drawn from their own experience and as authors of New York Times bestseller, The Lean Entrepreneur. Brant & Patrick