Work & Co Innovation & Technology Culture

What types of products or services does your engineering team work on/create? What problem are you solving for customers?

At Work & Co, our engineering team is known for building digital experiences at scale that people use again and again to improve their daily lives. From websites to mobile apps to chatbots, interactive installations and more for clients across industries, we partner closely with our team members across product, design and strategy to build digital products that make a real impact. 

One thing that I really appreciate in my work is how our clients value the technology team being involved from day one; I believe that really shows in the quality of the work we deliver. Along the way, we also help clients adapt in the age of AI, go to market faster and ship more frequently, which helps increase both conversion and customer satisfaction.

Tell us about a recent project where your team used AI as a tool. What was it meant to accomplish? How did you use AI to assist?

While we’re using AI tools internally as part of our process regularly, we’re also highly focused on integrating AI into consumer-facing products for brands. One example is Gatorade. We partnered to bring generative AI-powered product personalization and customization to market with an interactive 3D customizer that lets athletes design their own unique, personalized Gatorade Squeeze Bottles. 

We used AI in a number of ways. Adobe Firefly helped generate nearly endless possibilities for on-brand artwork that gets printed on the bottles. Then, in a less obvious but still crucial way, tools like ChatGPT and Claude helped us enormously to prototype complex animations that required the shader code OpenGL Shading Language. Working with shader language can be challenging, and having “AI as a pair programmer” allowed us to quickly build the gorgeous multi-color gradient loading animation that users see while their AI artwork generates. The ability to have the LLM adjust code via natural language input came in handy as well. We could instruct it to “make the colors more vibrant” or “rotate the direction of the gradient animation by 180 degrees.” Thoughtful comments in the code helped us learn as we built.

What would that project have looked like if you didn't have AI as a tool to use? How has AI changed the way you work, in general?

It’s less about what was impossible to do and more about the endless possibilities that were unlocked. We had earlier built a bottle customizer for Gatorade, but by integrating AI and allowing customers to harness it for their own creativity, we super-charged personalization and ensured there was no limit to the bottle designs a customer could create. At the same time, AI enabled my team to move quicker and get faster feedback from designers and our clients. Ramping up work in new frameworks or languages previously came with a significant learning curve, and in my experience, the use of AI tools is now helping tear down that barrier. 

Despite some initial skepticism, there were a few “aha!” moments that changed my perspective on the benefits that AI tools bring to the way I work. ChatGPT is a go-to for all sorts of syntax questions or tasks like initial discovery for technical approaches. Needless to say, AI is not a silver bullet, and we certainly can’t vibe code our way to quality software, but our everyday work benefits from leveraging these powerful and never-tired helpers.

How do you make sure all teams are on the same page when creating a product roadmap? 

Work & Co’s client partners have a broad range and include leading global brands like Gatorade and PGA TOUR. But one constant is that, in order to push for transformation and launch successfully, product roadmaps should be flexible. Business goals, desired features and preferred user experiences give us a starting point in creating our roadmap, but we ideate beyond what our client partners expect. We want to take the most innovative approach to create breakout customer experiences that drive results. 

Gaining alignment can be tricky, but our approach is to communicate our ideas in the form of testable prototypes to move forward. It motivates internal and client teams and gets everyone excited because the strategy becomes real; it’s a tangible experience of the product to rally around and gets everyone on the same page about the resources and timing needed to achieve key deliverables. It also helps that Work & Co’s project teams are lean and made up of seasoned, hands-on team members. This benefits us when decisions need to be made around the product roadmap because we have more expertise and a fewer number of minds to address the situation and move quickly.

How do you maintain this alignment throughout the development cycle?

Fast feedback loops and inclusivity matter. We include decision-makers regularly to maintain alignment instead of only looping them in around milestones. This is key for carrying out product strategy in real-time and allows us to make any changes to the roadmap on the fly, which is critical to the success of our projects. Regular involvement and transparent access to our projects and Figma files also create trust and ownership for all teams. 

Work & Co doesn’t operate in silos; we believe that all disciplines contributing to the project are responsible for realizing a client’s vision. Integrating teams such as quality assurance early on ensures coherence throughout the entire product development process to help us develop and maintain our roadmap and collectively deliver the best possible product to the market. 

Do project needs change during the development process? When this happens, how do you reprioritize the product roadmap and keep teams aligned?

We can always count on something to change, but an experienced team that communicates well can navigate whatever obstacles arise. Because we avoid handoffs, and clients’ teams and other disciplines are involved early on in the development process, it helps avoid major changes, since we’re validating and user-testing along the way at key milestones rather than just at the end. 

That said, product development can be inherently messy — and that’s OK and worth embracing. We’re constantly assessing information to move forward with our work. We partner with clients to spot gaps and address them as soon as possible or clarify our understanding of the subject to move forward. It falls on our product management team to find things that come up and require change. We quickly find time to meet with the appropriate people to clarify, make decisions and course-correct.

How is your team integrating AI and ML into the product development process, and what specific improvements have you seen as a result?

We’ve adopted a human-centered approach to AI integration that enhances, rather than replaces, our team’s capabilities. We developed a custom internal chatbot powered by OpenAI’s LLMs, giving our team a secure environment to leverage AI while protecting sensitive client information and democratizing AI access across all disciplines.

Our developers have embraced tools such as GitHub Copilot and AI-enabled IDEs like Cursor, all of which have accelerated common development tasks, such as boilerplate code generation, API integration and test writing, empowering our team to focus on more strategic and exciting aspects of product development.

We’ve enabled AI features on Notion, which we use as an internal knowledge base and  collaborative documentation platform for client deliverables. Integration of an LLM into the editing workflow lets us prioritize the substance of our work rather than focus on wordsmithing and formatting.

Hands-on experience with a wide spectrum of AI tools, models and platforms has enhanced our ability to conceptualize and build similar AI-powered solutions for our clients — from efficient internal tools that optimize operations to highly personalized, intelligent B2C products.

What strategies are you employing to ensure that your systems and processes keep up with the rapid advancements in AI and ML?

Our approach to staying current with AI advancements is multi-faceted. For client work, we typically adopt a composable architecture strategy, designing systems with modular components that can be updated or replaced as the underlying technology continues to evolve. This flexibility has proven crucial in areas like image generation, where we can transition between different models — this includes the recent shift away from Stable Diffusion and toward Flux — without time-consuming refactoring work.

We learn by shipping products. We engage directly with AI technologies and test, iterate and refine in real-world scenarios. This helps us gain experience and deepen our understanding of new technologies as they emerge and often lets us offer our clients a distinct first-mover advantage.

Knowledge-sharing is critical to keep up with the fast pace of change. Our monthly “What’s New in AI” sessions foster cross-company dialogues, so we can share our collective expertise and stay ahead of industry developments. We invest in our team’s growth through continuous learning opportunities, helping us maintain a forward-looking perspective on AI advancements and each one’s practical application in our work.

Can you share some examples of how AI and ML has directly contributed to enhancing your product line or accelerating time to market?

Our recent collaboration with Gatorade and Adobe — a path-breaking Gen AI-powered customization experience on the Gatorade iD membership platform — is a prime example of AI’s impact on the products we build. By integrating Adobe Firefly, we’ve transformed the traditional Gatorade Squeeze Bottle into a canvas for personal expression. Athletes can create unique bottles by simply describing their vision, whether inspired by their sport, personal interests or artistic preference, ensuring each bottle is as individual as the athlete who carries it.

With Adobe Firefly Services APIs, we’ve enabled the generation of on-brand designs that maintain Gatorade’s iconic aesthetic and unlock unprecedented creative freedom. The customization experience is seamlessly integrated into Gatorade.com, where members can earn points to generate bottle designs or draw inspiration from preset options, making personalization both engaging and accessible.

The overwhelmingly positive response and packed booth lines at this year’s Adobe MAX conference validate our approach to using AI to create deeply personalized experiences and get granular in tailoring each product to match an individual user’s taste.