Services
Coaching and Co-Development — Build your team's capabilities, not your dependency on ours.
Your team is capable. They just need a CMS-experienced partner to build alongside.
The problem.
Your organization has a development team. They're capable — maybe even experienced in .NET. But they've never built on Optimizely or Umbraco, or they've inherited a codebase they don't fully understand, or they're facing a complex implementation that needs more expertise than they currently have.
You don't need to outsource the whole project. You need an experienced team to work alongside yours — teaching, building, and stepping back as your team gets comfortable.
The solution.
Some organizations prefer to have an agency partner handle ongoing development. Others want to build that capability in-house. Coaching and co-development is designed for the latter — your team does the work, with experienced support alongside them, and comes out the other side ready to own what they've built.
We'd love to talk.
Ready to talk through your project? We're ready to hear from you. Drop us a line.
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The coaching and co-development process.
Every coaching engagement starts with understanding where your team is and where they need to be. From there, we define a plan that balances getting the work done with building your team's skills.
The engagement structure scales to your team's experience level and the project's complexity. We've defined three models that cover most situations — but the details are always customized.
Our opportunities for coaching.
Head Coach
For teams new to the CMS platform. We lead the development while training your team alongside. Our developers handle architecture and complex features while carving out time each sprint for code review, pair programming, and best-practice walkthroughs. As the project progresses, your team takes on more ownership. By launch, they're ready to maintain and extend the site independently.
Co-Captains
For teams with strong .NET experience but limited CMS-specific knowledge. We share development responsibilities from the start, with our team leading on platform-specific patterns and your team contributing where their existing skills apply. The handoff happens at a pre-determined milestone — after which we shift to review and guidance, and your team is running the site on their own.
On-Demand Guidance
For teams that are mostly self-sufficient but hit specific challenges — a complex upgrade, a tricky integration, an unfamiliar CMS feature. We provide targeted support through pair programming, screen-sharing sessions, and code reviews, scoped to the specific problem.
Ongoing Partnership Plans
A website needs attention after launch — new features, design updates, strategic guidance, and someone who knows the code when something breaks. We offer monthly partnership plans that cover development, design, and consultation for sites we built and sites we inherited.
Web Strategy
Content strategy, information architecture, governance, and CMS planning — the strategic decisions that make complex web projects succeed.
.NET Development
Custom .NET development on Optimizely, Umbraco, and Contentstack — built for complex content and the editorial teams who manage it.
Ongoing Partnership Plans
Development, design, strategy, and consultation — monthly support partnership for sites we built and sites we didn't.
Case Studies
A few coaching projects we're proud of.
Featured:
Staying Consistent Throughout Front-End
Helping bring consistency to Mercury Systems’ front-end design — and to their front-end development practice.
A partnership in coaching and co-development designed to bring a regional communications giant up to speed on Episerver (now Optimizely).
Optimizely coaching for MSU Moorhead immersed them in their new implementation and prepared them for the future.
Our thoughts and guidance on co-development and coaching.
Before you dive into co-development and coaching, here's what's worth thinking through.
Frequently asked questions.
How long does a coaching engagement last?
It depends on the gap between where your team is and where they need to be. A Head Coach engagement for a full CMS implementation typically runs the length of the project — three to six months. Co-Captains engagements are often shorter. On-Demand guidance can be as brief as a few focused sessions.
Will our team really be independent after coaching?
That's the goal. By the end of a coaching engagement, your team should be able to maintain the site, build new features, and handle routine CMS updates independently. For more complex challenges that arise later, we're available for on-demand support.
Does coaching work for teams that aren't .NET developers?
Our coaching practice is focused on .NET CMS development — specifically Optimizely and Umbraco. If your team works in a different stack, coaching may not be the right fit, though we can still advise on content architecture and CMS best practices regardless of platform.
Can coaching happen alongside a full build, or is it a separate engagement?
Either. Coaching is most commonly embedded within a build project — your team learns by working alongside ours on a real implementation. But we also offer standalone coaching engagements for teams that have an existing site and want to build their capabilities for ongoing maintenance and development.