On creating synergies.

Significa is a Design-led company that takes on product creation from concept to launch. Sounds simple, but behind the scenes there’s more to it: we currently share office space with 2 other companies and our work and culture is tightly shared between all.

Significa started out as a design studio and that‘s something that we mean to keep deeply melted into our DNA. We’re all designers and we all think like designers (even our developers and office manager come from a design background).

At a certain point of our early life as a company, about 2 years ago, we were struggling to deal with wider scoped projects. Our development man-power was frankly limited and our outsourcing efforts were falling short with communication issues and the fruition ending miles away from expectation.

It was frustrating doing our best and witnessing the ever-growing quality of our work being questioned by some not-as-good-as-possible implementation. It lacked the polishing and the level of perfection we were working hard to achieve.

Enter Coletiv. They are a new tech company that approached us and we both saw an opportunity to create something special without compromising our identity.

Coletiv’s vision aligns perfectly with ours: to deliver quality driven products. The first project we took together ran perfectly fine. Their developers are not only excellent coders but they actually fit like a glove within our culture. Even though they are hardcore technical people with no design background, we all get along pretty well as we understand the value in each other.

By bringing everyone together in the same physical space we bring new perspectives to the table, create dialogue between different thought processes allowing us to keep things fresh. There’s also undeniable value in having close contact and merging teams together to fulfil the shared goals of a project, allowing us all to push the limits but, at the same time, adapt and pivot quickly around limitations.

By keeping things separate, we allow each other to keep focus on what we do best. It allows us all to become the best on what we love to do instead of trying to absorb every know-how into a single entity that wouldn’t correctly represent who we are. It allows everyone to grow at their own pace and to their own vision while keeping all the advantages of having no gap between design and development, the ability to share processes and, together, an overall amazing capability of being able to take on any kind of project — no matter how challenging it is.

More than two years went by and things are going smoothly. Even though we share office space, project management, Christmas dinners and company retreats we like to keep things separate. We don’t want to take on development-only projects and Coletiv doesn’t want to take on design-only projects. We’re working on almost every project together and we’re learning a lot from each other. We’re even closing the gap further on Product Development with Adamant: a third company specialised in cyber-security.

Let’s see what the future holds.