Foundry is the manifestation of our entrepreneurial DNA, and we live it every day.

We started with a mindset of outcomes over effort, and developed that mindset into habits as a process. Today, it’s how we run our own projects, and how we guide yours. Foundry isn’t a thing — it’s a way.

Outcomes Over Effort.

Foundry product development instills a value-based perspective across functions & teams building software product portfolios.

Our approach shifts the typical SDLC currency from units of effort to ROI; building only what is optimal and opportune to address the market.

Foundry nurtures a venture mindset inside your organization, constantly challenging the portfolio of products to grow at any stage.

Sales-Led Transformation

Here’s where Sales, Product and Engineering come together for a positive sum. When big ideas emerge, we front-load them with the best people to surface the stakeholders’ underlying motivations and map the risk: benefit landscape. We accelerate a commitment to yes, in whatever form it takes — doing so ensures accountability and efficient resourcing to mitigate the path dependency and slow burns rampant in traditional business initiatives.

What we’ve made a best practice at Headstorm, we deploy to clients as immersive workshops built in collaboration with Carnegie Mellon University.

Human-Centered Design (HCD)

Human-Centered Design isn’t just for user interfaces. At its core, HCD is an inclusive discipline that brings the right contributors and stakeholders in at the right time, instead of the last minute.

Our HCD workshops are foundational to transformative product design, and we’ve honed our methods to run them in live, hybrid, or fully virtual environments. We’ve even developed a turn-key HCD Workshop In A Box for our clients to deploy best practices.

Incubation Cycle

We validate, iterate and fund our own products through an internal incubation cycle. Part of being a Headstormer means having the bandwidth to pursue impactful ideas, and we use validation to stress test those ideas with data-driven & fail-fast mindsets.

Each idea evolves over 4 phases with biweekly proceed-or-pivot decisions. The best of the best get funded to launch as commercial products (Kurb.io) or open-source (Foundry UI). And when ideas hit their incubation ceiling, the project owner absorbs and communicates lessons learned so we all grow.

Foundry In Practice

One of our first Foundry processes produced a system so useful, we named it after the process itself.

Foundry UI is an extensible interface system – meaning it sustains (and grows) with a product from POC to MVP to launch to avoid bogging down designers & devs as new releases are built, and preserves a familiar interface as users receive those new releases.

Kurb

From winning a 48-hour civic hackathon to launching betas in select cities, Headstorm-powered Kurb exemplifies how we practice what we preach.

Kurb.io is a collaborative city planning tool, developed to bring “tactical urbanism” to the masses as cities rethink and redesign themselves post-pandemic. The free beta is now available.