“Rarely can you find the perfect balance among ‘design’ expertise, ‘marketing’ savvy, and ‘functional’ understanding; Thinktiv is that rare find. And because they do it all well, you save money by not having to hire separate firms.”

Harry Lin
CEO, Listspinner

Our Approach to Visualizing Business
Customers come to Thinktiv because of our ability to dig in on the most challenging brand, marketing and product design problems. Through our iterative Think/Make process, we work with our clients to deliver comprehensive, valuable, and market-ready solutions.

We pride ourselves on our ability to rapidly assimilate information and simplify complex concepts into small, manageable chunks that we can share to gather feedback and refine. Think/Make provides the structure for that work. It helps us engage with our customers with an easily digestible working model that guarantees the business value through alignment and collaboration. The approach suggests an iterative “build up” towards a solution with constant collaboration with our customer partner as opposed to a hand-off at the end of a long private cycle.

The strength of the process lies in its iterative effort to understand and reflect customer and project requirements. This includes understanding users, business requirements, economics, market space, competitors, technologies and business roadmap. And the core principals of Think/Make are in everything we do, from the simplest refinement of a brand asset, to the most robust deployment of a new product.

Omit Complexity
Progressive companies and early stage businesses require rapid development for their market-changing ideas. But the complex network of business consultants, agencies, specialists and technology outsources make high-quality, cost-effective innovation nearly impossible.

We strive to omit complexity by providing a single ecosystem of thinkers and makers that approach each initiative both individually and holistically within its context. Our team is collection of highly accomplished specialists that span disciplines including ethnography, brand creation and management, user interaction and visual design, product strategy, decision support systems, and software development. We staff projects using the right resources at the right time to create the highest ROI for each dollar spent.

Visualize Business
We are visual problems solvers and believe people make better decisions using pictures. Our goal is to become your imagination—helping you visualize what’s possible and make improvements by creating a “portfolio of plausible possibilities.”

We generate lots of ideas—we model them, paint them, prototype them, photograph them, produce them, and put them on display for our customers to evaluate and critique. Then we synthesize the critique with business goals and repeat the process. The result is a tangible view into the future with an answer to the question: “What would it look like if I tried it this way?”

We call this process business visualization and we’ve used it successfully to package goods, create social networks, design auto-buying experiences and reinvent user interaction models.

Design for Disagreement
The key to unlocking value using business visualization is producing artifacts for discussion and debate. Each graphic artifact is an ‘egolessly’ delivered argument that provides a thoughtful, logical, structural representation of the solution. Each argument isolates the product, problem, purpose and stakeholders, arranges them spatially and provides a necessary context for decision making.

Our project teams use this platform as a conduit to discuss and disagree with team members, clients and audience as a means to finding the smarter better answer that results from this constructive conflict. It is through disagreement that we unlock passion, reveal core values and develop a strong point of view that differentiates our solutions.

Iterate Rapidly
The world moves quickly. We believe the best laid plans go to waste when it takes months of effort before clients have the opportunity to react and evolve. Whether we’re in the middle of a identity development exercise, building a media campaign to support a product launch, or developing an iPhone application to extend consumer reach, our goal is to deliver many iterative releases.

Each release delivers value through the opportunity to discuss, opine, revise and sometimes even re-prioritize the next steps. It’s not uncommon for us to release multiple times per week – and it’s even more common to look back at a project plan and marvel at how far you’ve come in a short period of time.

To learn more about how to engage with us on a program and take our innovative Think/Make approach for a test drive, get in touch.