I’m excited to announce that some of the world’s most renowned User Experience (UX) design experts will be joining the Pivotal Labs team with our acquisition of UX Design firm, Slice of Lime. Slice of Lime’s impressive industry accolades are numerous and include highlights such as the prestigious UX Magazine’s Most Effective User Experience Agency and Outside Magazine’s Top 100 Best Places to Work (2015).
Colorado-based Slice of Lime is recognized not only for the world-class caliber of their work, but also for their outstanding workplace culture—fun, stimulating, and innovative—making them a perfect fit with Pivotal. We’re very proud of the design practice at Pivotal Labs. Combining Pivotal’s multidisciplinary UX and user interface (UI) design methodologies with Slice of Lime’s talent will help us meet a rapidly growing client demand. We’re excited to continue to deliver solutions that can transform the future of engaging digital experiences.
As part of welcoming Slice of Lime formally to the team, I recently sat down with Kevin Menzie, the founder and CEO of Slice of Lime at the Denver Pivotal office. An excerpt of the conversation is included below.
So why build Slice of Lime? What inspired you?
Sitting down to talk to Slice of Lime CEO Kevin Menzie on today’s Pivotal acquisition.
At Slice of Lime, our tagline was “We Create Amazing Experiences.” That’s the vision I had when I started building Slice of Lime 15 years ago. We’ve created amazing experiences in the work we’ve done—for our clients, and for ourselves.
I’ve always been interested in human-centered design supporting the achievement of our clients’ business goals. As Slice of Lime matured, we began to apply agile methodologies to our UX Design process. This led to a highly collaborative and effective client experience.
I’m also passionate about creating a culture in which employees can thrive. At Slice of Lime, we assembled a top-tier team of incredibly talented UX designers that were constantly teaching and learning, both inside and outside of the company. We had an open dialogue on where to take our UX Design practice and were always sharing what we learned from one project to the next. This collaborative approach resulted in a culture that’s been recognized as the “Most Effective UX Agency” as well as one of the “Top Places to Work in the Country.”
Our culture is one of teaching, learning, curiosity, listening, experimenting, and iterating on ourselves. We see those same tenets at Pivotal, so it is easy to see how we as a team will thrive as Pivots.
Why Pivotal, why now?
Welcoming Slice of Lime’s CEO Kevin Menzie to the Pivotal family.
There is incredible momentum right now in the automotive, medical, and financial sectors as they realize that the same Silicon Valley smarts that have paved the way for software giants like Google, Facebook and Yahoo! now applies to all businesses. They are swiftly learning that a digital transformation of their business is not only an essential minimum for their customers, but—done right—is also a tenacious competitive advantage that could leapfrog them to the forefront of their industries. Pivotal has been hard at work for nearly 3 years helping companies realize that those Silicon Valley smarts are not confined to Silicon Valley. Pivotal has been bringing that Silicon Valley state of mind to industries of all types, in all geographies. From the putting in the underlying plumbing of running software to the experience at the user’s fingertips, Pivotal is teaching companies in all industries how to be the next great software company. As I said earlier, we are a culture that’s always curious and thrives on experimenting and learning. I couldn’t name a more exciting place where this is happening today. With our UX Design process mirroring Pivotal’s process in many ways, it’s only natural to come on board and be a part of this pivotal movement. We can’t wait to dive into and innovate in these spaces.
What are you most excited about?
Slice of Lime team getting excited about the sheer variety of applications for their skills with Pivotal Labs clients.
The short answer is: everything! The exciting thing about what Pivotal is doing is that no company, no industry, no person in the world is left untouched by this digital revolution. Pivotal technologies and methodologies are helping build autonomous vehicles, helping doctors create precision medicine where patient DNA can factor into tailored therapies, and helping financial services companies detect fraud in hours and minutes versus days or weeks. The sheer variety of ways our team can help employ our extensive UX design experience in areas such as the Internet of Things, enterprise big data, consumer web and mobile applications is exciting. Joining Pivotal exposes us to so many more clients doing fascinating work as they transform into technology and innovation-driven organizations.
How do you think your team will fit in with Pivotal?
Pivotal core values align well with Slice of Lime’s culture.
The combination is a natural one. We’ve partnered with Pivotal on several projects for over five years. I’ve known a number of Pivots for a long time, and have seen first-hand how well our values align. We share an iterative approach, a focus on collaboration, and we require empathy for users—all things that embody the way we think about designing products and working with clients.
Like Pivotal, Slice of Lime has defined success by doing the right thing for customers and their users. We both believe that helping customers build their digital business is transformational. Importantly—and foundational to how we both approach this—is teaching and leaving behind for our customers an imprint of success that they can take forward.
I’m looking forward to seeing the teams come together as one, and we all look forward to the new things this collaboration will bring.
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