• Remote team retreats: Magical retreating in NOLA

    Team MAGIC, or “The Magicians” (as they are known within Alley) found themselves with a rare opportunity to link their in-person retreat with the American Alliance of Museums yearly conference in New Orleans. Team Magic has worked on many museum projects and a few members of the team were speaking at the conference last year. So, instead of choosing a random city somewhere in the continental United States of America, the Magicians set their sites on the birthplace of jazz.

  • Rule of Scrum

    As a scrum master and coach, I see the phrase “doing scrum wrong” thrown around a lot. But Scrum rules are made to be broken.

  • People gesturing in front of a computer in a meeting that matters

    Getting to implementation in an ideas world: Making your meetings matter

    Technology is changing rapidly and penetrating every aspect of our life. Everything is new, and every idea seems possible. “You could change the world,” technology whispers to us, “if only you choose the right idea.” Many of these ideas start in a meeting room. So how do you, as an implementer, stop yourself from going insane in meetings and keep your coworkers from killing you for squashing their ideas?

  • What airplane design and digital news design have in common

    At Elevate! in Chicago, CEO Austin discussed Alley’s recent design work for The Dallas Morning News with Mike Orren, their Chief Product Officer. Learn about their conversation, through the lens of a metaphor that he often uses to discuss how to make tough choices about page speed while designing a news website: Airplanes.

  • Using design thinking to navigate a “Lift and Shift” enterprise WordPress project

    A “lift and shift” project involves moving functionality wholesale from one platform to another. It’s a common request, and it can work well under the right circumstances — but creating conditions for success in pure migration projects requires careful consideration of the tradeoffs and paradoxically, a clear commitment to design thinking.

  • Remote work: Teamwork at a distance

    As you might imagine, working remotely changes how you relate to and work with your colleagues. This starts at the very beginning with hiring, but carries through to every day we spend working as a team. Here are some of the most important parts of the process.