As we head towards the launch of ThoughtWorks Studios and our first product, Mingle, it is a good time to reflect on what has been a fast moving 12 months.

Early 2006 saw the start of discussions with Roy (founder and chairman of ThoughtWorks) and others with regards to the future evolution of the company. For the last seven years I had been responsible for the set-up and growth of the Australian practice within ThoughtWorks and it was time to look for new challenges.

Something had always perplexed me during these previous seven years. Something was missing. ThoughtWorks had extensively leveraged our knowledge and IP as we went from project to project and enabled vastly accelerated start points for our clients' projects. Due to ThoughtWorks' core DNA being one of rapid evolution and continuous innovation, there is no doubt that we have a culture of building products for our own use (and then usually opensourcing them) where we perceive that a gap exists within the current market. CruiseControl and Selenium are good examples of this. However it is an incredibly challenging concept to take all of these core ThoughtWorks ingredients and focus them on building commercial products. My background prior to ThoughtWorks was always in product development, therefore the prospect of ThoughtWorks' Product development sounds very interesting. That's what was missing.

May 2006 - and after a period of creating business cases and other governance issues, we are now heading down a road that will lead to ThoughtWorks significantly broadening our service offerings. We will create a product development unit with the same focus on quality and client satisfaction that we currently have in our consulting practice. This unit will leverage our world-class software delivery capability and our culture of innovation to deliver products that work the way our customers and ThoughtWorks like to work. In many ways this is just a focussed evolution of the company, we have a history of successful product development, specifically in the OSS world. The only difference now is that we will develop both OSS and commercial products.

But what do we build? To decide this we looked to leverage our entire global organization and defined a formal process for ThoughtWorkers to submit their product ideas and to assess them using a wide range of criteria and a broad audience of ThoughtWorkers from different backgrounds and roles. We used this process to come up with a shortlist of the five ideas that represented the best prospects for product development. Once we had the shortlist we spent considerable time applying our QuickStart process (an accelerated Solution Definition phase) to these ideas and then defined business cases for each of them. The final result was the two ideas that represented the best ideas for early development by ThoughtWorks Studios (the recently applied name for the product development unit).

October 2006 saw the kick-off of development of Mingle in Sydney, Australia. ThoughtWorks Studios was up and running.