A Digital Product Innovation Firm Built For Outcomes, Not Artifacts
Role: Founder & CEO · Years: 2014–2023 · Exit: Acquired by Delve (2023)
The Gap altr Was Built to Close
altr was created to bridge a recurring gap I kept seeing in the market: organizations needed consumer-grade experience quality and rigorous human-centered design, but rarely got both.
By 2014, disciplines like human factors and systems engineering—common in aerospace and medtech—had long optimized for safety, usability, and reliability. At the same time, consumer technology companies such as Apple and Uber had raised expectations for clarity, coherence, and polish.
What was missing—especially for startups and lean enterprises—was a model that combined these strengths and still shipped.
That gap showed up organizationally. Teams were accountable for outcomes, but lacked the authority and alignment to deliver them. Strategy, design, and delivery lived in silos; execution moved forward, while decisions about scope, priorities, and success criteria remained fragmented.
altr worked across those silos to align leadership, product, design, and delivery early—creating the clarity and decision-making authority required to bring ideas to market.
We didn’t sell deliverables. We helped organizations make better decisions about what to build—and carry those decisions through to real-world performance.
How It Started
As altr’s reputation grew, we organically attracted and sustained partnerships with a mix of iconic global brands and frontier-stage innovators operating in complex, high-stakes domains.
Key Clients
Lean Operating Model
altr rejected the traditional agency pyramid and its politics.
Geordie McClelland joined as Co-Founder and Chief of Strategy, partnering with me to scale the firm—intentionally lean and designed to reduce friction across strategy, design, and delivery.
We built small, senior, high-performing teams with clear decision ownership and minimal internal drag. That structure attracted exceptional people—and gave them a rare environment to do their best work, grow quickly, and sustain their energy over time.
The result: speed without chaos, discipline without bureaucracy, and trust without theater.
Designing for Scale
Rather than producing one-off artifacts, altr focused on building capability.
We helped teams establish shared principles, decision rules, and governance so they could make good decisions without us in the room.
To enable this, we built a delivery operating system—a connected system of processes, templates, and governance that deliberately blurred strategy, design, and engineering boundaries while making decision dependencies explicit. This allowed work to progress iteratively, with insights compounding rather than resetting at each phase.
We weren’t just creating deliverables. We were designing organizational confidence.
Designing Beyond The Engagement
Client Impact
Delivered step-change outcomes across regulated, consumer, and frontier domains
Enabled AI-driven and human+AI systems for Humana, Becton Dickinson, and Sea Machines—driving engagement, growth, funding, and market expansion
Led multiple 0→1 and scale launches, including patented AI-enabled platforms and decision-support systems
Built modular, scalable experience systems for Converse and Jitterbit, accelerating speed-to-market and product-led growth
altr
Built and scaled a globally trusted digital product firm
Earned Top 1% ranking on Clutch for five consecutive years (2019–2023) and won numerous industry awards
Established long-term executive partnerships through repeat engagement and scope expansion
Acquired by Delve (2023), validating altr’s design-led growth and operating model
Outcomes That Echo