NEW CASE STUDY: How we built top-rated shopping apps for Crate & Barrel and CB2
Handling every pixel with care — and more crucially, with purpose.
Charting a focused vision for long-term success.
Expertly guiding you through the entire digital product lifecycle.
Building world-class digital products that stay ahead of the curve.
Leveraging data & analytics to help your digital products surpass their potential.
Insights on what’s now and what’s next in tech, mobile & digital products.
For today’s luxury brands, merely having a digital presence isn’t enough. Customers of premium brands expect nothing less than a seamless, elevated journey from the moment they land on a website or open an app.
In this blog, we’ll explore how Theme Manager bridges the gap between design and development, why it’s a game-changer for scalable digital products, and how it empowers brands to stay adaptable in a fast-moving market.
Discover how App Intents can transform user engagement and prepare your iOS app for the future of AI. Learn why building App Intents today ensures your app is ready to leverage Apple Intelligence for smarter, more seamless experiences.
By driving uniformity and enhancing collaboration, design systems enable teams to work more efficiently with a shared single source of truth. In this blog, we’ll dive into the essentials of design systems, explore their components, and highlight how they optimize collaboration for digital product teams.
On August 25, 2025, Google will officially discontinue support for Firebase Dynamic Links, which means your app’s deep links could break, frustrating users and eroding brand trust. If your app is still using Firebase Dynamic Links, now is the time to act.
The Heady team is committed to delivering high-quality digital products by optimizing the way designers and engineers collaborate. Here’s a closer look at how we achieve this by prioritizing communication, leveraging shared design systems, and building a culture of trust.
Heady's QA team ensures that every digital product we create meets our rigorous quality standards. In this blog we explore one crucial tool in our QA team's toolbox, API response validation, and share scripts you can put to good use.
WordPress is wildly popular (and for good reason), but it’s simply not built for enterprise — lacking both the flexibility and the security that brands need as they scale. Here’s a look at the platform’s biggest flaws, and how migrating to a new CMS can give your brand’s digital presence a major boost.
At Heady, we understand the importance of staying ahead of the curve. That’s why we've adopted Maestro, a cutting-edge tool to simplify and enhance mobile UI testing. In this blog, we’ll cover what Maestro is, how to best use it, how it compares to other testing tools, and why it’s become a key part of our software development toolkit.
In a connected mobile ecosystem that gets more complex each day, the role of mobile product manager has never been more important, or more challenging. Plenty of attention has been paid to mobile product..
In June Figma hosted their Config 2024 conference, introducing a variety of exciting new updates that promise to enhance our design workflows. In this blog post, we’ll share the key new Figma features that the Heady Design team can’t wait to start using.
Recent shifts in Apple's stance on Progressive Web Apps (PWAs) have cast a shadow over their future viability. In late January 2024, it was revealed that Apple was quietly removing the ability to install home screen web apps within the EU. This decision was reversed in March following backlash from developers and tech media. While the immediate threat has been alleviated, the incident highlights a larger, looming uncertainty for PWAs.
Building on the momentum of tools like ChatGPT, which attracted over 100 million users in just two months after its 2022 launch, AI technology continues to see notable advancements and increased adoption at hyper speed. Here's a look at how it's impacting the way we build digital products.
From Brooklyn to Mumbai and so many cities in between, working at Heady means being part of a global team. Our New York and India offices are separated by nearly 8,000 miles and a nine-and-a-half hour time difference, and while we may be worlds apart, we pride ourselves on being a close-knit and collaborative team.
In the ever-evolving landscape of web development, constant change is the norm. Enter micro frontends: a groundbreaking architectural pattern promising a fresh take on flexibility, scalability, and collaboration. Micro frontends break down monolithic frontend applications into smaller, more manageable modules, empowering developers to work in their own space while weaving together a seamless user experience.
There’s often a gap between how fantastic a company believes itself to be — promising aspects like an engaging culture or unlimited PTO — and the lived experience of its employees. For some companies, this gap is a chasm, but for those that emphasize respect and prioritize their employees, perception matches reality. We are thrilled to announce that we have been certified as a Great Place to Work™ for the second year in a row, proving that Heady belongs firmly in the latter category.
Ever tried building a house of cards?One slight breeze or wobble and your masterpiece comes crashing down. Now, imagine your backend development project is that house of cards. Without a robust environment setup right from the get-go, your project is just as vulnerable to collapse. So how can we ensure our project is more sturdy skyscraper than shaky card house? It’s all about setting up a solid project environment.
At Heady, our experience managing dozens of products and hundreds of releases has taught us the value of robust ticket writing. This sometimes overlooked skill is critical to the successful and timely delivery of software. This blog explores the essential skill of how to write agile tickets and best practices that every product manager should know.
When mobile presence is a key part of your brand’s digital strategy, delivering an exceptional app experience must be a top priority. From a seamless user interface to innovative features, the goal is to create an app that not only serves its purpose, but surpasses user expectations. One clear sign that you've hit the mark? That coveted 5-star rating in the Apple App Store or Google Play Store. It's an acknowledgement that your app stands out from the crowd and a testament to your commitment to excellence. But if you take a stroll through the app stores, it quickly becomes clear that not every app achieves this 5-star status — or even comes close. Why is that? And more importantly, how can your brand bridge the gap?
Welcome to Heady’s guide on leveraging the power of Knex.js and Knex-migrate in your full-stack web development projects. This blog is one installment of our multipart series, "Building Full-Stack Web Apps with PostGraphile and React.” If you're looking to streamline the way you handle database schema creation and management, you're in the right place. Knex.js is a versatile SQL query builder compatible with Postgres, MSSQL, MySQL, MariaDB, SQLite3, Oracle, and Amazon Redshift. It's not only flexible and portable, but it's also an enjoyable tool to use. In this guide, we'll explore how to use Knex.js, along with the complementary tool Knex-migrate, to maintain our database schema and manage dummy data.
After attending MAU 2023 in Vegas last month, the Heady team returned to our Brooklyn HQ with heads full of insights and ideas. As the biggest mobile acquisition and retention summit, this wasn't just an event to see and be seen — it was a chance to dive deep into the most pressing topics in the mobile app space, and to bring back valuable learnings for our partners. From industry juggernauts like Google and TikTok to pioneering technology partners like mobile attribution and marketing analytics platform AppsFlyer, multichannel customer engagement platform Braze, and cross-channel growth marketing platform Iterable, the crowd at MAU 2023 represented the many different facets of the mobile app landscape. At Heady, we believe in continuous improvement and staying ahead of the curve.
Through significant research, extensive conversations with leaders and team members both inside and outside the Engineering department, and the spirit of collaboration that underlies everything we do at Heady, we've engineered a fresh blueprint for our team — a new structure that we believe will support the success of our organization, our clients, and our team members for years to come. Knowing that many other organizations are or will eventually be in a similar situation, we documented our restructuring process in detail in order to share it as a guide. Every team is different, and an approach that works for some organizations may not work for all. Before we dive into our restructuring process, look at the big picture, and make changes to set us up for both present and future success.
In an industry that’s historically been male-dominated, it’s more important than ever to shine a spotlight on the women — and the moms! — who are making waves. Women represent just over half of the overall workforce, but currently only hold 26.7% of tech-related roles, not to mention a mere 10.9% of CEOs or senior leadership positions within the tech sphere. But there are also countless women — many of them mothers — out there who are not just meeting these odds head-on but excelling, innovating, and leading the way in tech. Moms are undeniably some of the greatest heroes of our lives: They're our biggest cheerleaders, our most reliable shoulders to lean on, our mentors, and our inspiration. Prepare to be inspired by these trailblazing top women in tech and learn how they’re shaping our digital landscape, bit by bit.
When it comes time to develop a mobile app for your company, one of the most crucial early-stage decisions is choosing the right development approach: Should you build a native app or a non-native app? To make an informed decision, you’ll first need to understand what’s at stake and the options that are available. Native apps are designed exclusively for a specific operating system and offer better performance and a more seamless user experience. In contrast, non-native apps can run on multiple platforms and are more cost-effective and quicker to develop. Which route you choose will depend on numerous factors including business needs, user needs, and your budget.
With the Shopify Buy SDK, you can smoothly transition your existing customers from your web store to an in-app experience. By allowing them to maintain a single user account and order history and access previously stored payment methods across both web and app, you can give them a consistent and uninterrupted customer journey. Before developing a mobile app, the brand already had hundreds of thousands of existing customers — so ensuring all those users didn’t have to create a new account to purchase via the app was absolutely critical.
So you’ve launched a new website or mobile app. Now what? Your organization has made a significant investment to launch the product, so continuing to make room in your budget for it may at first seem unnecessary. Now might feel like a time to rest on its success — but the truth is, a digital product is never truly finished. When launching any digital product, you’ll also need a plan for how you’ll manage its lifecycle.
According to a 2022 report by IBM, a data breach costs an organization more than $4 million on average, and 19% of breaches occurred because of a compromise at a business partner. It’s clear that keeping data safe has never been more crucial to a company’s bottom line, yet even high-profile technology companies sometimes fall short when it comes to their security practices. A long-term project we’re working on here at Heady involves the use of Salesforce OCAPI (Open Commerce API). OCAPI is a collection of highly customizable APIs that support ecommerce-related applications, providing similar functionality as a Salesforce storefront but through API.
Launching a mobile app is a major undertaking for any brand, and for companies with multiple brands under one umbrella it can be especially challenging — not to mention expensive. Each brand has its own distinct personality and demographic, and accordingly, you want each brand’s app to have its own unique identity and its own roadmap to allow for digital evolution. Think of a parent company like Gap Inc.: Gap, Banana Republic, Athleta, and Old Navy all serve distinct customer segments, with mobile apps that feel distinct but still unified.
Meeting demand for the hottest new sneakers isn’t easy: Popular silhouettes like the Air Jordan 1s often sell out before they even hit shelves. Sustaining hype at the same time is even harder, and retailers in the increasingly integrated worlds of high fashion, streetwear, and sneakers are rising to the challenge of delivering hyped products to as many people as possible through programs like raffles and first-come-first-serve drops.
At Heady we believe everyone should be able to use and benefit from the digital products we build — that’s why we’re passionate about Inclusive Design and Accessibility. We believe it’s essential for designers (and anyone who works on digital products and services) to understand the principles of Inclusive Design and Accessibility in order to create designs that are truly usable for and enjoyable by everyone.
Here at Heady we’re constantly searching out new ways to help our team members do their best work and live their best lives. From unlimited PTO and a flexible hybrid schedule to awesome team gatherings (think World Cup matches in the conference room and post-happy hour karaoke), we take the pursuit of fulfillment seriously — and that’s precisely what motivated the launch of our latest employee benefit.
As 2022 comes to an end, we’re taking the opportunity to look back on an incredibly exciting year at Heady. From making key leadership hires and growing our team to tackling even bigger and better projects than ever before, it’s been a year of epic growth across the spectrum.
As we head into the busy holiday season, concerns about a recession are growing ever louder. According to Bloomberg’s latest monthly survey of economists, there’s now a 60% chance of a recession occurring in the next year, up from 50% in September and compared to a 30% chance six months ago.
So your company launched its mobile app — congratulations! While getting your app off the ground is a major milestone for any organization, from a customer journey standpoint it’s just the starting line. Getting users to download your new app is the easy part. Now, you’ve got to drive user engagement and loyalty by giving them compelling reasons to return to the app again and again. It’s no secret that as smartphones tighten their grip on modern consumers, the effectiveness of more traditional marketing methods is waning.
In this blog post (and future posts to come), I’m excited to (re)introduce you to Heady’s Design team and all the ways we’re evolving our department. I joined the team earlier this year as Heady’s first Director of Design, and have been incredibly honored and humbled by the team’s trust in me as I set out to build a multidisciplinary and inclusive design team. Read on to learn about Heady’s three-pronged approach to inclusive design for digital products and how we bring it all together.
According to Forbes, there have been 13 recessions since World War II. Three were in the 21st century and many experts warn another is on its way, predicting at least a 50% chance of a recession in the next two years. Some experts argue it’s already here, while still others insist we’re only experiencing a downturn. Whatever you want to call them, these economic slumps happen more frequently than most people realize, and they are generally much less ominous than some would make them sound. And markets tend to bounce back after a downturn – often returning even stronger. So as we experience this current downturn, the question all business owners should be asking themselves is: will we make it to the bounce back? If you are sure the answer is yes, then make no mistake: now is not the time to pause your growth and hold steady. Now is the time to level up.
To return to in-person work or not to return? That’s the question facing so many CEOs and organizations, including us, since rising vaccination rates and falling case numbers began to shape a vision of the post-pandemic landscape. Here at Heady, we believe that there’s no one right approach (other than listening to our most important stakeholders, our employees). That being said, we’ve put an immense amount of thought and strategy into navigating these new waters with the goal of keeping our organization and our culture intact. So we decided to share the four pivotal questions that guided our decision-making, both for the benefit of our own internal team as well as other organizations currently wrestling with the same decision.While this is the approach Heady took after much consideration and collaboration, there’s no one-size-fits-all prescription here: Your organization’s needs may be different, and we encourage you to find your own North Star when it comes to finding the balance between a return to normalcy and keeping employees safe.
You know them. You love them. You work with them. But do you ever wonder what a day in the life of a Product Manager is actually like? They say you can’t understand another person’s perspective until you walk a mile in their shoes. So, we're introducing "The Heady 8" - to answer the inevitable "What do you do?" question, PMs all face. We hope you enjoy these thoroughly honest musings from Heady Product Managers, and should the spirit move you to (consensually) hug a PM after this, please do!
Every business today is focused on its digital future. And rightfully so. With customers’ attention more fragmented than ever, sales success is tightly bound to meeting customers where they are—which is online, largely on their phones, using increasingly sophisticated mobile apps. As a result, modern engineering focused on digital products and experiences has never been more integral to achieving business goals.
We’re still flying high from our recent recognition as a certified Great Place To Work from the people at (you guessed it) Great Places To Work! Beyond the pride and gratitude we feel for this honor, in true Heady form, we wondered, “How can we use it to help others?” So, we decided to distill the elements that serve as the cornerstones of how we work together into guiding points that other employers can emulate.
When it comes to technology, the only constant is change. But some changes cause more noise than others, and over one year ago, that was especially true with the release of iOS 14.5 with App Tracking Transparency measures (also known as ATT). The update certainly resulted in a fair share of grumbles, particularly among digital advertisers. At Heady, we believe in not just acknowledging but embracing changes in tech and staying ahead of the curve. We also advocate for enhanced digital privacy, so we looked at the release as a good thing. Not just for consumers and privacy advocates, but for the industry as a whole. It’s over one year later, so we’re asking: Were we right to look on the bright side?
So this Mother's Day, we'd like to give a little nod all to the moms in tech — be it moms of blended families, moms of fur babies, moms who serve the role by choice rather than by blood, etc. — who have been doing ALL THE THINGS, working out the kinks, and who know that in the end, the only U/X that matters is that your kids feel loved. To that end, we spoke to a few mothers who work in this industry — and whose own experiences were very much in beta — about what they’ve learned while iterating in this new landscape.
The Heady philosophy is that developers should do QA work alongside development work in order to get the code released, but the QA department is focused on breaking the code. In short, both the departments are integral and collaboration is required to release the best potential product. We launched Heady's QA department based on for principles: Ownership, Transparency, Data-oriented Communication, and Bilateral Growth.
Mobile shopping is on the rise and retailers are looking into how mobile apps fit into their omnichannel strategy. A mobile commerce architecture is critical to ensure you’re laying the proper foundation for your mobile strategy.
At the onset of social media (think MySpace) the networks were created as a way to connect with people you already knew, or wanted to interact with. It’s hard to imagine the creators of these platforms could have ever dreamed they would be facilitating millions of online business transactions per day, but that’s exactly where we are.
Why are so many companies (retail, consumer goods, grocery, etc.) investing in mobile e-commerce applications? To put it simply, they’re following the money. Statista projects e-commerce sales from mobile devices will surpass $432 billion (with a “b”) by 2022. That’s a lot of cheddar.
The COVID-19 pandemic took retailers through a range of emotions and actions. First, there was fear as grocery stores (for some reason) ran out of toilet paper. Then there was adaptation as businesses did the best they could given the circumstances. Now, retailers are focusing on innovation as we all do our best to operate in the new normal.
Apple and Facebook are duking it out, iPhone users are updating their OS, and product managers are wondering
Converting an app from iOS to Android, or vice versa, is a fairly common task for mobile product designers. Some brands design for iOS first because Apple users tend to have greater purchasing power and spend more on apps.
iOS 14 App Clips offer a powerful solution for businesses to get new users to discover and interact with their brands. How so? App Clips appear organically as users go about their normal day-to-day tasks, like ordering food or looking for information, and offer streamlined ways to complete those tasks.As such, App Clips can enable businesses to enjoy:
Apple finally did it.They announced big-time changes to IDFA.They announced big-time changes to IDFA.Speculation had been mounting for months that Apple would deprecate their proprietary device identifier, and it looks like that’s exactly what they’re going to do as they roll out beefed-up privacy features in iOS 14.Okay, exactly isn’t totally accurate.
We’ve all had an experience like this. Say we want to order something from Target’s new curbside pick-up program, Drive Up.
We surveyed smartphone users to better understand their mobile app usage and uncovered 11 insightful app statistics highlighting critical pain points your customers are experiencing. In this original study, we share our findings and explain how Apple iOS 14’s App Clips can eliminate those pain points to create satisfied customers poised to become repeat customers.
We are the silent partner behind native iOS and Android apps for top brands like ScottsMiracle-Gro, Motel6 and Hibbett Sports, keeping them a step ahead of the competition.
A traffic surge takes down your app in the first hour of Black Friday. Bad actors hack and release all your user data. You watch a competitor’s MAUs skyrocket after they introduce a killer new feature.
Mobile apps sometimes flop, way too soon after launch. New feature development sometimes goes sideways, turning users away from a mobile app they once loved. Such snafus happen for a number of reasons..
Starting and building a mobile product consultancy requires a flurry of choices at every turn. Where to invest your time and effort? When to divest time when you are not seeing a return.
This article is useful for the developer who is dealing with multiple git accounts. The following steps are the list of command which will help you when dealing with multiple git accounts.
If you are interested in PostgreSQL as your Database and use GraphQL for your CRUD operations then this post is for you. I was very curious about this combination.
Too often technology is mysterious — especially for time-starved product owners. In an ideal world, technology should be guided by business objectives, not the other way around.
When Heady evaluates a given tech or tool — a programming language, progressive web apps, marketing tools — we start by asking lots of questions about..
Change creates opportunities. These days, the digital landscape is evolving rapidly. The increasingly connected world we live in is bringing more people online, including blind and deaf users..
Because forms are an essential component in any application, it’s good that building forms are a fairly simple task. The easiest type of forms to handle is those with fewer total fields.
In Part 1 — Building Full-stack web app with PostGraphile and React (Server-side) we covered server-side for our full-stack web app. In this part, we will be covering the client-side.
Before we start, I would like to give a quick background story behind this post. This is a sub-post of the Building Full-stack web app with PostGraphile and React. So I have used related table names.
JavaScript Date is the most commonly used method. The date plays a significant role in any type of application. Even in our daily life, the date serves a purpose.
The ELK Stack (Elasticsearch, Logstash, and Kibana) is the world’s most popular open-source log analysis platform. ELK is quickly overtaking existing proprietary solutions..
One way is by leveraging apps. As a mobile product consultancy building sustainable innovation in design and technology, we’re seeing encouraging numbers from our own clients.
Among VC firms and the business press, retention is often overlooked in favor of all things new: new talent, new business, new tech. Steady progress might not seem glamorous, but it’s effective.