Midwestern

Nobody remembers the person who did everything. They remember the person who made sure nobody had to. For clients working with us, that mindset shows up as consistency. Teams that don't stall when one person is out. Projects that don't hinge on a single person's memory. Systems, not heroics, hold the work together. "I've been dealing with systems over individual heroics." - Jesse Kinzer Jesse and Kahlie Huff on the hardest part of leveling up as a leader: letting go of the scrappy, do-it-yourself instinct that got you there in the first place, and building systems that set the next person up to succeed instead. Not about cloning yourself. About giving people the structure to make it their own.

OpenAI just shipped their first hardware product, and it’s not what anyone expected. It’s a $230 keyboard. Codex Micro, built with Work Louder, is a compact macro pad designed to speed up how developers work inside Codex. Joystick for launching workflows (review a PR, debug, refactor). Dedicated keys for accept/reject/push to talk. A dial to adjust reasoning depth on the fly. There’s something to that. Everyone’s been speculating about OpenAis big swing into consumer hardware, smart speakers, wearables, the whole Jony Ive mythology. And their first real shipped product is… a keyboard for developers lol. It’s a reminder that sometimes the most important user isn’t the mass market, it’s the builder. Curious to see if this becomes a pattern, hardware that serves the workflow, not the hype cycle. Link to the launch below. #OpenAI #codex #hardware #technews

I've started to believe that clarity is one of the most underrated skills in product design. Not visual clarity, although that's important too. I mean the ability to take a messy problem, conflicting opinions, shifting priorities, and a dozen different constraints, and turn them into a direction that people can actually rally around. I've worked on projects where everyone was smart and everyone was working hard, but the team never really agreed on what success looked like. The design kept changing because the goal kept changing. When the direction is clear, the work tends to move faster. Feedback gets better. Tradeoffs become easier. Decisions stick. I've realized that's where I've been spending more of my energy lately. Less time asking how we can make the interface better, and more time asking whether we're solving the right problem in the first place. In my experience, the quality of a product usually reflects the clarity of the decisions that shaped it.

Man-on-the-street content on LinkedIn? They said it wouldn't work. Jonathan Gonzalez said, " Hold my latte" ☕ Every Thursday, our content team links up with another department for caffeine and conversation. This is Midwesterners. A series about our people and what they're into. "I don't know why the dev-to-farmer pipeline is so real, but I promise you, it's a real thing." That's Mason Kleinsorge Engineer by trade, plant dad on the side. He built an AI tool to track his houseplants because the collection got out of hand. Our people contain multitudes of hobbies and personalities Who else at Midwestern do you want to see next?

You.com needed to keep users inside their ecosystem. That meant rebuilding the experience from the ground up. The problem: a new UI, a search results page that had to perform, and a product that couldn't afford to lose users to a slower, clunkier experience. So we embedded with You.com's designers and engineers and rebuilt it together: → Rebuilt the search results experience → Rebuilt the embedded apps → Brought the product to iOS and Android for the first time → Built the mobile experience for YouChat One team. One consistent product, across every platform a user opens it on. Here's what their Co-Founder had to say: "They've seamlessly replaced all of our near and offshore development teams with onshore teams that have increased productivity at a comparable price." —Bryan McCann, Co-Founder & Board Director, You.com Our engineers sat in their standups, worked off their roadmap, and shipped to You.com's bar for quality. That's what embedded means: talent that operates like it was already on the team.

Brazil is proof that the Global Talent model works. Not a pilot or an experiment that we're still evaluating. A branch built across the world that delivers what we've always delivered: US-led accountability, global capability, and a structure that protects the craft. Human-centered approach. Builders, engineers, and designers operate inside a system that holds their standards and our clients' expectations at the same time. We spent the last year building toward this positioning: talent partner for the AI era of work. Brazil is where it stopped being a direction and became a result. This is what building a talent partner for the AI era of work looks like.

You can't hire your way out of a process problem. You can post the role. Interview faster. Pay more. Run a tighter funnel. And still end up six months in with the same churn. Someone leaving inside a year, the seat reopening, the team carrying the gap. The job description usually comes before anyone defines the work. Most reqs we see get written around a symptom. A project slipping, a manager underwater, a team that "needs more capacity." The gap underneath rarely makes it into the role itself. It's not obvious if this is true everywhere, but across the 120+ engagements we've run, the companies that hire well take an extra step first. They define the work before they define the role. Scope, ownership, and what success looks like in 90 days. Then the hire.

The best teams are built by people who make the hard stuff look easy. For Sonya Mead, that means mentoring without being asked, holding the team accountable, and making the hardest weeks look manageable. Ask anyone on the team and they'll tell you the same thing. We see you, Sonya. Thank you!