The Process

Working with whiteMAKO, you will notice that we do things very differently. We have built our company from the ground up with a focus on making things effective. We've tried and tested our methods over numerous projects and know what it takes to be successful. At the core of these methods is a process we employ on all projects ensure that progress is made quickly while maintaining a high level of quality.

A Typical Project

Every project can be split into three major phases of work. Sometimes we are called in for one and sometimes for all three.

Here is the path of a typical project.

Planning

All our projects start with a planning phase. This is the most important phase because it determines the direction of everything to follow. We emphasize this phase for all our projects because most problems in projects stem from poor planning or a lack of planning. The last thing you want to do is start building only to run into a problem and have to rebuild again and again, wasting both time and money. With proper planning, it is easy to minimize both the time and costs of completing a project.

Planning Project Ideas

• Business: Competitor analysis to identify threats and opportunities
• Design: Market research to identify target customers and what style appeals to them
• Technology: Creating a framework for development expansion to speed up development

What can our planning do? See for yourself.

Development

The development phase is also important because it is the direct transcription of the work from planning into something tangible. The hardest thing about development is not finding a company than can do it, but finding a company that does it well. The fact of the matter is that there is no formal training for most kinds of development so it is hard to know whether you're getting the best results.

Sometimes we are called in for development and other times clients will have their own development teams. In those cases, we operate as development managers, creating protocols, overseeing development, and evaluating progress.

Development Project Ideas

• Business: Marketing strategy development
• Design: Interactive development (ex: Flash, rich internet applications)
• Technology: Web development

What can our development do? See for yourself.

What about our managed development services? Take a look.

Execution

While Planning and Development focus primarily on creating a product, Execution focuses on what you do once you have a product ready. Execution is important because just having a great product is not good enough to be successful. The go-to-market execution that follows is critical.

You need to have both a great product and great execution to guarantee success. If you have a great product, but no one knows about it, what good is all the planning and development? Likewise, if everyone knows about your product, but it's terrible, what good is all that execution?

Execution Project Ideas

• Business: Strategic consulting, Commercialization
• Design: Usability analytics
• Technology: Performance monitoring

What can our execution do? See for yourself.

Our Principles

Be Needy

Too often companies try to launch products without ever pausing to figure out what their customers really want. With every project we do, we make sure that we are delivering what people want by identifying on their needs first and building around that. If you focus on people's needs and not just your own ambitions, you'll find that creating successful products is all too easy.

Be Agile

The process of building a product can be daunting. At the beginning of the process, companies will create long specification documents that end up never being updated or used, causing development to go over budget or fail altogether. Millions of dollars are wasted in these unfinished projects.

We follow a more Agile methodology. It is an iterative development model where instead of waiting until the end of development for a usable product, we create release-worthy products iteratively. With each iteration, we identify what is needed have in the next revision so that at any step of the way, you can go to market with your product. This avoids the long periods of uncertainty with traditional development models.