Founded in 2011 on a radical idea: the person who scopes should be the person who builds.
Made In Tandem started as DevMynd Software in a cheap office in Chicago's Wicker Park. The founding thesis was simple: the person who understands your problem should be the person who builds your solution. Senior people doing the work, not managing the people who do the work.
That thesis held for 15 years. Through a rebrand, through dozens of enterprise projects, through work with everyone from startups to the U.S. Department of Defense. The name changed (DevMynd became Made In Tandem). The principles didn't.
What changed is everything around it. And that's why we're in the middle of the most significant transformation in our history.
Gold Stevie Award 
CODiE Award Finalist 
Inc. 5000 
Best Place to Work We're rebuilding MiT from the ground up. On purpose.
When a model can scaffold an entire feature in an afternoon, the bottleneck isn't typing. It's judgment. Knowing what to build, whether what was built is correct, and how to get it into production safely. So we rebuilt around that. We wrote the whole argument down: The Only Person on Stage Who Makes No Sound.
We rebuilt around Conductors: senior engineer-architect-PM hybrids with 10-15+ years of experience who own outcomes end-to-end. They're supported by AI agents for execution and senior engineers for the hands-on build. The result is a senior team of two to five people that delivers comparable or better outcomes, 10-20% faster.
Not 50. Not 200. Intentionally small. At this size, flat structure works naturally. Everyone knows their clients directly. Culture is lived, not legislated through a handbook nobody reads.
AI agents and senior engineers amplify what each Conductor can deliver. 10-20% faster delivery means 10-25% more shipped output in the same timeframe, with the management and communication overhead of a small team.
Not a database of resumes. A professional community with shared quality standards. Five years minimum experience. Vetted through paid working sessions. They work like part of your team, not a detached resource.
We're not an "AI consultancy." We're a technology partner that happens to be very good at building things with AI.
AI is how we work, not the boundary of what we build. Every engagement, whether it's a React front-end, a data warehouse migration, or a multi-agent AI system, runs through the same Conductor model: senior judgment, amplified by AI tooling, supported by human engineers, and tied to production handoff from the start.
Our mission is straightforward: put senior engineers on hard problems and give them the tools to move fast. That means custom application development, data platform engineering, system integrations, and yes, applied AI and automation. The common thread isn't any single technology. It's the pattern we've seen across 50+ engagements over 15 years: the work that matters most is usually the work nobody wants to do. Connecting disconnected systems. Cleaning up data pipelines. Building an app around the spreadsheet that somehow became mission-critical infrastructure.
We'd rather diagnose the real problem than sell you the trendy one. That's why every engagement starts with senior people who ask hard questions and tell you what they actually find, not what you want to hear. It's consulting built on candor, delivered by people who've been doing this long enough to know what works in production and what just looks good in a demo.
Read what we believe → The Only Person on Stage Who Makes No Sound
The simple thesis
When you give senior engineers the best tools, difficult problems to solve, and direct access to the stakeholders things get built. Plain and simple. We’ve run this playbook for a long time, many of us 2 decades or more and it keeps paying off for our clients and for us.
The mission
We put senior engineers on your hardest problems and give them AI tools to compress timelines and deliver enterprise-grade production software. The goal is systems your team can run: code, docs, deployment paths, and operating notes included.
Who we serve
Mid-market companies (roughly $50M-$500M revenue), including PE-backed portfolio companies undergoing transformation. Too big for freelancers, too small for 15-person consulting teams. Six priority verticals: B2B software/SaaS, manufacturing, insurance, energy and utilities, healthcare, and logistics.
Six values. Same ones since 2011, refined by 15 years of actually living them.
We started with twelve. (Way too many.) We've been editing them down, and editing ourselves up, ever since. These aren't aspirational slogans. They're the filter we use for hiring, for client relationships, and for the hard conversations that keep a small firm honest.
Ship Quality Work
We take pride in our work and strive for sustainable and maintainable solutions. We resist compromise, attend to detail, and validate our work.
Open The Door
We help each other, we value diversity, and we are inclusive. We provide feedback and encouragement constructively, gently, and often. Above all, we work together.
Rise to the Challenge
We believe that obstacles present opportunities for growth. We remain cool under pressure, we talk about what needs fixing, and we work together to implement solutions.
Act with Integrity
We believe in radical honesty and transparency with our clients. We do the right thing for the project, even when it's the hard thing. We strive to be trustworthy.
Focus on Client Success
The Made in Tandem team gets stuff done! We value a true understanding of our customer's business. We help them find the right solution for their problem – even if it's not what they expected.
Continuously Improve
We learn – and we teach – every day. We grow our early-career developers through apprenticeship. We strive to make experimentation and learning both expected and safe for everyone on the team.
Be Kind.
Build Stuff.
Go Home :)
That's the whole culture statement, and it means exactly what it says. Everyone at MiT delivers client work. From the CEO down. Nobody just manages. Nobody just sells. Nobody just reviews other people's output.
Think of it like a jazz quartet, not a symphony orchestra. A small group of exceptional musicians who play off each other, where everyone solos and everyone accompanies. The people who thrive here get energy from shipping: watching a data platform go live, seeing a client's AI system generate its first real business insight, deploying the integration layer that connects three systems that have been siloed for a decade.
Kindness and directness aren't opposites; they're complements. Someone missing delivery dates gets direct feedback, quickly. A client who's scope-creeping gets a frank conversation about trade-offs. But it's always done with genuine care for the human on the other side. We've spent 15 years earning a reputation where clients refer us without being asked, and engineers stay because the work is good. That trust compounds.
The jazz quartet model
We're intentionally small by design, not by accident. 15-20 Conductors at full scale. At this size, flat structure works naturally. Everyone knows their clients directly. Communication is organic. Culture is lived.
Everyone ships
Our CEO stays in the delivery mix, shipping as a Conductor. That's a structural decision, not a phase. The culture of a small firm is set by what leadership does, not what leadership says.
Work hard, go home
Work should be challenging and rewarding, but it's only part of life. We hold to a strict "40-hours or less" work week policy. Life, family, friends, hobbies, and passions...these are what make a person whole, work is just a piece.
Kind, smart, and collaborative. The kind of people you’d want to work with.
Most of us have been writing software for fifteen years or more. We picked consulting over staff jobs because we got tired of doing the same thing for the same employer year after year. The variety is the whole point. Different industries, different stacks, different constraints, and a new puzzle every few months.
We're a small group of senior engineers who genuinely like each other. People who'll argue about Postgres indexing over lunch and trade book recommendations on the way out. Former music majors. Self-taught coders. People with kids, people with cats, people with both. What unifies us is a shared bar for quality and very little patience for nonsense.
Everyone at MiT delivers client work, including the CEO. Nobody's gotten too senior to write code or sit on a Zoom with a frustrated stakeholder. That keeps us honest. Hard to lose touch with the craft when you're still doing it every day.
Our Leadership Story
Made In Tandem started in Chicago in 2011, at the height of the city's startup boom. Founder JC Grubbs got to software the long way around, trading classical piano for a code editor and teaching himself to build the systems he actually wanted to work on. The firm came out of a simple frustration: too many engineering teams were getting handed consultants who'd never shipped anything real. So he built the opposite. A firm of engineers who'd done the work, for clients who could tell the difference. Fifteen years on, that's still the whole idea.
