Our Process


Design Intelligence® ensures quality at speed by truly integrating an unrelenting focus on customer experience, the deep technical knowledge of our capabilities, and proven Agile delivery methods.

■ Design Intelligence® / Integration

human-centered design evolved

What’s Different About How We Do Things?

We take a holistic and human-centric approach to understand all facets of our client’s mission, organization, data architecture, security, and technical environments. We are better able to understand the real challenges our customers face (historical and real-time) as well as where there are areas of opportunity before implementing a solution. This mitigates risk, promotes continuous innovation, and ensures greater adoption by the people impacted most.

At Steampunk, there are two driving principles for delivery to our clients—speed and quality. Often, these two dimensions are at odds with one another, meaning to go fast you sacrifice quality, or to get high quality it takes much longer. By integrating an unrelenting focus on customer experience, proven Agile delivery methods, and the technical expertise of our five practices, we achieve extremely fast delivery of a high-quality product. We call this Design Intelligence® (DI).

Design Intelligence® is the lens through which we generate human-centered solutions. It’s the nexus of how we define, create, and deliver products and services – grounded in the understanding of the people who use them.

DI brings together proven commercial techniques, tools and processes through an integrated framework that delivers high value mission solutions to the government faster and with better results in terms of user acceptance and adoption. Steampunk follows our DI framework to perform work no matter which of our core competencies are being delivered. We focus on blending world-class designers with best-in-class technical expertise. Whether it’s Salesforce, Software Engineering, IT Operations, Data Exploitation, Organizational Strategy or Cybersecurity work being performed, our goal is to deliver the highest quality output—faster— for the greatest mission impact.

Principled Approach

We approach each project by fully understanding the problem space from a holistic and human perspective. Through this, we not only uncover the unique challenges each person faces, but also opportunities for how to improve their experience with the products and services they use. We inform strategy through empathy rather than assumptions and assists in stakeholder alignment, goal setting, and prioritization. We do this by facilitating workshops and conversations, surveying, interviewing, and observing users. The results are assets like journey maps, ecosystem maps, and personas that can be referenced throughout the project lifecycle.

Teams plan, design, and prototype what’s possible through collaboration and co-creation. Our process involves cross functional teams—inviting diverse perspectives to foster creativity and innovation thus driving better-informed solutions. Depending on the engagement, what results might be a high-level strategy to achieve specific mission performance indicators, a service blueprint, or wireframes that outline the foundation of a digital experience or product.

We build validation and trust through rapid prototyping, testing with and learning from users while making sure we don’t lose sight of technical parameters. This improves usability, accessibility, adoption, and satisfaction. It also reduces cost and technical debt by ensuring the experience meets both user needs and technical feasibility before committing to production.

We foster continuous development through measured releases, reporting, and testing, and mitigate risk through qualitative and quantitative data analysis. This ensures that solutions are impactful, sustainable, and always meeting the needs to the people who use them.

what we do best

Integrated into Delivery

We bring together Agile, DevSecOps, and Human-Centered Design techniques to provide the best of each, resulting in a delivery approach that brings speed, transparency, flexibility and technical excellence, all while keeping users and stakeholders at the core of our solutioning.

Design & Strategy

At the core of all we do, human-centered design keeps our clients’ needs in focus and enables us to do our best work, together.

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Digital Platforms

Helping our clients use Software-as-a-Service platforms to transform the way they serve their customers and achieve their missions.

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Cybersecurity

Since the early days of our company’s history, cybersecurity has been, and will continue to be, a critical mission we serve in defense of our clients, our nation and her interests.

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AI & Data Exploitation

Helping our clients capture, process, store, and exploit, the value of data, in support of strategic, and tactical decision making, and stronger mission achievement.

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DevSecOps

Bringing together development, operations, and security professionals to bring capability to the mission and embrace cultural change for organizational transformation.

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