We continuously learn new things, and share those things with you

collage of 3 images: external monitors with work in progress, bookshelf with toy robot on the top shelf, a person in a video call meeting

Purpose-built

Actionable advice for entrepreneurs who want to build products that people love.

Feeling stuck on something? It can be frustrating to feel like you don’t know how to de-risk your business, move faster, or validate your idea. You’re not alone. Running a startup is hard! We’re here to help. 

Check out our entrepreneur resources

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Podcast

The Bike Shed

On The Bike Shed, hosts Joël Quenneville and Stephanie Minn discuss their development experience and challenges at thoughtbot with Ruby, Rails, JavaScript, and whatever else is drawing their attention, admiration, or ire this week.

Listen to The Bike Shed

Podcast

Giant Robots Smashing into Other Giant Robots

A podcast about the design, development, and business of great software. Each week, Chad Pytel (COO) is joined by people who build and nurture the products we love.

Listen to Giant Robots

OPEN SOURCE

Build Better, Faster with thoughtbot's Open Source Libraries

Spend more time on your app’s unique functionality and leave the repeatable features to thoughtbot. With over a billion downloads, our open source projects power many of the world’s most visited websites.

Build better, faster

Design resources

Learn from our Design team

Answer your critical early business questions with our Product Design Sprint Guide through the design and prototyping process.

Run your design sprint

Development resources

Learn from our Development team

Since 2012, one way we’ve shared thoughtbot expertise is through the learning platform Upcase. With Upcase, we’ve helped thousands of developers level up their skills through workshops, videos, flash cards, and coding exercises.

Take junior out of your title

Our Approach

Customer Discovery Playbook

In our many years of experience designing and building products, we’ve learned how important it is to regularly ask, “Is this the right thing for us to be building right now?” A key ingredient in building that right thing is knowing who you're building it for and why they need it right now. This collection of customer discovery exercises will help your team find (or regain) customer, product, and strategic focus.

Read more now

ONLINE WORKSHOPS AND EVENTS

We host events and facilitate discussions on a variety of product strategy, design & development topics

Past event recordings can be found on our Events page and we encourage you to sign up for our newsletter and follow us on socials to learn about new events where you can join us.

Check out our events

Chat with us

Mentoring & Office Hours

Office hours are free, remote drop-in sessions where our experienced designers and developers devote their time towards mentoring, answering your questions or discussing your goals for your products and product teams.

Learn more here

Books

Take one off the thoughtbot bookshelf

Ruby Science

The canonical reference for writing fantastic Rails applications from authors who have created hundreds.

Get Scientific!

Testing Rails

Learn to test Ruby on Rails web applications from the ground up in this comprehensive guide to modern testing practices.

Test Like a Pro

Maintaining Open Source Projects

Learn the many facets of creating, growing and maintaining a successful open source project.

Start Giving Back

Domain Name Sanity

Learn to make domains and TLS certificates predictable and debuggable, while grasping their core concepts with plenty of examples.

Master your domain

Maybe Haskell

See what it’s like to program in a language without null. You might even learn some Haskell along the way.

Just Buy

Goal-Oriented Git (Beta)

Learn to accomplish your Git goals without getting distracted by internals or confusing terminology.

Check It Out

What does success look like for your project?