Why we’re called Measured

Names are hard. We thought a lot about ours. We landed on Measured as the best reflection of who we are and how we work.

We thought we’d expand on that here, in case it helps people understand us better. (And, selfishly, we might be glad we wrote this down one day.) So: here’s why we’re called Measured.

We take care in our work

Whether it’s our approach to technology, design, strategy, or ways of working and communicating, Measured encapsulates our careful, precise approach.

As mantras go, we don’t love move fast and break things. We prefer move fast and leave things better than you found them. We don’t want to break things, and we want the people we work with to know that. It’s better, more responsible and faster in the long run to not break things.

Measure twice, cut once is the vibe.

We’re pragmatists

We have professional opinions, and we share them when it’s helpful. But we’re pragmatists, not ideologues; helpers not disruptors.

In our experience, strong opinions lead to heated discussions, and heated discussions end in logjams. We listen more than we speak, and we find the middle way (again, fastest). We always flex to the client’s unique circumstances.

We quantify

We’re goal-focused. We prioritise outcomes over outputs, and we favour those that can and should be measured.

We’re not blinkered about it. We don’t view metrics in isolation, ahead of everything else. But we value objective and transparent measures of progress. It makes our work accountable, validates good approaches, and helps us correct course when needed.

In truth, we weren’t thinking about metrics when we came up with the name, but it works, even if it’s something of a retcon.

We’re craftspeople

Measure means the length of a line of text. So we started using measured and isMeasured in our code as property and class names. It indicates that a piece of text should have its line-length restricted for readability rather than filling the width of its container.

In other words, Measured is a small doff of the cap to the craft of what we do.