On the cutting edge: Celebrating 30 years of technological innovation and leadership at Thoughtworks

This May, Thoughtworks is proud to celebrate 30 years of helping their clients across the world to build the modern digital businesses of the future through the application of strategy, technology and design. Since launching in 1993, Thoughtworks is now over 12,500 people strong with 50 offices in 18 countries.

Thirty years of leadership in any industry is a remarkable accomplishment. But especially in the rapidly changing technology industry, it demonstrates a relentless, company-wide commitment to innovation and client impact.

“It’s about more than just luck for us,” said Chris Murphy, Thoughtworks’ CEO of North America. “We’ve built into our culture this ability to proactively stay ahead of the industry, by attracting, growing, and retaining the passionate, diverse technologists who want to bring that thought leadership to our industry, to our clients, and to society.”

Murphy, who’s been with Thoughtworks for almost 20 years, has seen much of this growth firsthand. Thoughtworks was an early pioneer of agile software development, and has been fundamental to multiple industry innovations including CI/CD, microservices, evolutionary architectures, infrastructure as code, lean portfolio management, and data-mesh. They have helped hundreds of businesses to use technology to build leaner, more responsive, and more adaptive organizations.

“We’re constantly asking ourselves, ‘Are we still relevant? Are we still innovating? Are we still continuing to bring unique, differentiating value to our clients?’” Murphy said. “And I’m proud to say that as long as we’re asking ourselves those questions, we’ll be able to see over the next 30 years the success we’ve seen over the last 30.”

Most recently, Thoughtworks launched its Engineering Effectiveness solution, which helps businesses empower their software engineering teams to deliver more customer value, more efficiently and more effectively.

“Since the pandemic, many organizations have invested in top-notch engineering talent but they’re seeing dwindling productivity,” Murphy said. “Now, how can they empower and retain that talent while delivering more customer value, more quickly, and with less wasted time? How can they improve the developer experience? These are just a few of the areas where Engineering Effectiveness can help.”

In Thoughtworks’ experience, some organizations utilize as little as 30% of their engineering function’s optimum capacity. Engineering Effectiveness helps developers to spend more of their time delivering value, while reducing friction and waste in their workflows. “This, to me, is really the next evolution of agile,” Murphy said. “It’s this systematic, scalable way of increasing productivity, so you can be nimble and get to market faster.”

Murphy now looks forward to the next 30 years — and beyond — of Thoughtworks industry innovation and thought leadership. As he said, “There’s no room for complacency. With the industry changing so quickly, organizations like Thoughtworks must continue to innovate and adapt.”

Of course, no one can predict exactly what the future will bring. But Thoughtworks plans to be there for it — continuing to innovate and lead technology-led business transformation.

“Thoughtworks has a 30-year history of providing a curated understanding of technological evolutions and applying them in real, practical terms to get real, practical outcomes,” Murphy said. “Our continued focus on that will give us the best opportunity to be at the forefront of embracing new technological changes as they come. And I think that’s very exciting.” Learn more about how to accelerate business-wide transformation with Engineering Effectiveness.