Shift Lab: 10 years in retrospect, plus a new website

This year Shift Lab celebrated its tenth anniversary. For me, significant milestones often create moments of reflection. The gift of time and experience allows patterns to emerge, helping to clarify who we are as an agency, what we do best, and what we value in our people and clients.

Starting Shift Lab was about doing good work with good people. I’m happy to say that’s still true, and that we are moving into a chapter where we are making sure we are delivering that promise at a larger scale. That happens through clear and consistent articulation, instilling these values in others, and walking the walk everyday. I’m most proud that we’ve built a team and culture that does exactly that.

At the outset of 2022, we set out to reflect on our mission, goals, and values and, ultimately, determine how we, as Shift Lab, should communicate those to prospective teammates and future clients. This summer, we quietly rolled out Shift Lab’s new website, which shares the outcomes of much of this thinking with the public. It’s the third iteration of our website over the last ten years and is — by far — the most purposeful articulation of who we are, what we do, and why.

We exist to help digitally-dependent organizations make the best technology decisions.

I find these exercises of agency self-reflection to be challenging and painfully time-consuming, for good reasons. As a product design and technical agency, it’s our job to demystify the process of building things. Not easy.

Luckily, ten years of experience has helped connect the dots on who we are and what we do best. At our best, our outputs must matter to the businesses we’re working for, and we should be able to quantify and measure that success together. We do this by building business specific software — whether that’s a website, e-commerce system, backend systems, or an application.

We understand customers’ constraints and aspirations, demystify difficult technology decisions, and bravely ship engaging digital experiences.

Building things that move the needle on our clients’ businesses requires deep, meaningful collaborations with our clients. These relationships, on the technical side, need to be long-lasting and must meet these businesses where they’re at by adapting to the product lifecycle. In our history, our client relationships average over 4 years with some lasting well over 8 years.

Over the past nearly three years, we’ve added a product design discipline and team. As builders, this allowed us to fill important gaps in user experience, track the nuances of product success, and generally make us better at building and shipping technical products.

We imagine a world where every client is positioned to grow and thrive.

Above all, we’ve found that our company values have continually guided us to success, in both our internal team building, our working processes, and the identification of good-fit clients. So, we’ve doubled down on those to make sure our values are a key part of our decision making as we continue to guide and shape the agency.

The past 10 years have been filled with ups, downs, and, most of all, learning. Like all technical products, we’ll never consider this work done. It’s just another iteration in the life cycle. Here’s to another ten years!

About the Shift Lab website

The Shift Lab website is built in Next.js using Typescript and Tailwind CSS, hosted on Vercel. We have integrations and automation with Google Analytics (GA4) and Pipedrive CRM, thanks to some fun zaps in Zapier. Content is managed by Contentful. Performance metrics, uptime, and quality control are monitored through Cypress, Sentry, and Datadog.

Lastly, we have some cool Storybook and Figma design system automations using Figma Tokens. Check out our sample component library at storybook.shiftlab.co.