Moment Chicago is making a change
Today is an exciting day. Moment Chicago is becoming an independent company. Moment New York is being acquired by Verizon. Things are happening.
When we moved out here exactly two years ago to open up our Chicago business, we felt like pioneers. We landed in a city where we knew almost no one. We had no projects based here in Chicago. We were working out of someone else’s office (which was really someone else’s house). I can admit now that there were some days where we spent more time playing HORSE on our Nerf basketball hoop than was strictly necessary.
Within a few months, things changed. We started to meet new people. We hired new staff. We started doing projects that got us really excited in cool spaces like VR and chatbots and automated user testing. We got new clients (that’s a pretty important one for a consultancy). Even better, we got really awesome clients with really hard problems. And best: these were Chicago-flavored problems like “How do we improve restaurant efficiency from the workers’ perspective,” and “How do we design software that powers complex industrial processes,” and “How we do we design the ideal service experience for people buying insurance.”
And now here we are. We’ve got more companies asking us to do work than we have designers to do it. We are growing our staff rapidly. We have a really nice office in River North. We’re splitting from Moment, but we’re not going anywhere.
Don’t get me wrong: there’s definitely some bittersweet feelings here. We’ll miss our colleagues in New York, but we’ll happily update everyone’s contact information from “coworker” to “friend.” My co-founder Drew Gold and I have a lot to do in the next few weeks to set up our new business. Ultimately, however, the things that are changing are just details. What’s not changing is that we’ll continue to help companies solve the most important and complex product and service design problems that they have. We’ll help them with sticky design management problems. We’ll take clients on journeys into the unknown and come through on the other side with amazing products. And we’ll have a (rapidly growing) team of amazing designers that are here to do the hard work.
So, we’re going to spend today reflecting on where we’ve been and being excited and giddy and just a little anxious about what’s happening now. I might brush off the Nerf hoop. And then tomorrow it’s back to work.
Originally posted on LinkedIn on March 1, 2018. Written by Josh Lucas-Falk.
