About — Tilted Windmill

Origin

Why "Tilted Windmill"?

Don Quixote charged windmills he believed were giants. The phrase "tilting at windmills" came to mean fighting battles you can't win.

We took the name on purpose. The work we do — shipping new digital products through enterprise procurement, security review, legal, IT, finance, and a stakeholder map that goes three levels deep — is the kind of work most teams treat as quixotic. Most outside vendors quote it, accept it, and then quietly fail at it.

We don't. We've been doing it for fifteen years.

The reason most enterprise initiatives stall is not the code. It is everything that happens around the code.

That has shaped what we are. We're not a code shop that occasionally has to "deal with the client's process." We're a team built around the process — strategists, engineers, and operators who treat procurement and stakeholder navigation as a first-class part of the engagement.

The code part is the part most vendors promise. We deliver that. But we also deliver the part nobody else wants to take responsibility for: getting it through your company.

Operating principles

The way we work, no matter the engagement.

Six things we believe strongly enough to say no to work that violates them.

/01

Be the team in the room.

We integrate with your engineers and product people. We attend your standups. We don't disappear into a sprint cave and surface with a deliverable.

/02

Show the work daily.

You see real running software every day — not slide decks describing what you'll see eventually.

/03

No black boxes, ever.

If you want to talk to the engineers writing the code, you can. If you want to read the code, you can. Nothing important is hidden behind a relationship-management layer.

/04

Tell the truth about scope.

If we don't think the build is the right one, we say so before the contract. If we're not the right team, we say that too — and tell you who we'd recommend instead.

/05

Own the delivery.

Procurement, legal, security, finance — we treat all of it as part of the build, not as someone else's problem.

/06

Ship.

Everything else is in service of this one. The work doesn't count until it's in production, in front of real users.

Where we've been

Some of the companies we've worked inside.

The logos below are not from a sales deck. They are companies whose engineering, procurement, security, and approval processes we have personally been through — and shipped through.