What does Thoughtful Apes do?
The faster a car drives, the further ahead the headlights need to reach to navigate safely.
Most product teams hit the pothole and call it a speed problem. It is usually a visibility problem. Seeing further ahead is futures work. Staying on the road is execution. Almost every practice does one or the other. Thoughtful Apes does both.
Navigable futures is what sits between vision and execution: futures a team can actually steer towards, expressed as frameworks concrete enough to use the next day. There is a gap in the market between futurists who never ship and product people who never lift their eyes past the current quarter. Foresight studios hand a team a deck of provocative scenarios and no road back to next week's roadmap. Product consultants tune the sprint and never ask where the sprint is heading. Teams leave the first kind inspired and stuck, the second kind busy and blind.
Any metaphor breaks if you pull it too hard. Headlights do not tell you where to go, only how far you can see before you have to commit. The steering stays yours. What this practice does is brighten the beam, delivering the clarity your teams desperately need to move at the speed of business today.
About Caitlin
I'm Caitlin Steele, and I built this practice out of fifteen years spent inside the machine, watching it work and watching it fail.
- Atlassian. Design leadership across Trello, Jira Work Management, and Confluence (an organisation of 20+). Trello Mobile reached a CSAT of 91, the highest ever recorded across any Atlassian product. Transit Lines & Touchpoints, the cross-surface decision-making framework this practice runs on, was built here.
- GitLab. Design for the Plan Stage and its 50M+ users. I drove the three-to-five-year UX vision other stages adopted as their template, and the repositioning framework I built now sits in GitLab's language.
- MasterClass. Employee number three. Helped take it from unvalidated idea to 100K+ users; now valued at $2.5B.
- lululemon. Mobile commerce design, where the checkout redesign added an estimated $20M+ in annualised revenue.
My narratives get used years after I leave. The through-line, across references from people who have never met each other, is the same one: hand me a tangled system and I will hand back the language and frameworks that make it usable for everyone else in the room.
Caitlin Steele - The University of Edinburgh | LinkedIn
As employee number three at MasterClass, I helped take the startup from an idea with… · Experience: The University of Edinburgh · Education: California Polytechnic State University-San Luis Obispo · Location: Edinburgh · 500+ connections on LinkedIn. View Caitlin Steele’s profile on LinkedIn, a professional community of 1 billion members.
Caitlin Steele