Howell & Gibbs

§ — What we offer

The services

We take on whole projects, not pieces, and we take a small number of clients each year. Below is the full range — the product work we take on end-to-end, and the individual skills and competencies we think are most useful to offer on their own.

Design & engineering

We build the whole thing

A designer and an engineer who have shipped together. You get both halves of the work from the same two people: No handoffs, no telephone between the person who designs it and the person who builds it.

  1. 01

    Product design and direction

    Getting to the right thing before getting to the screens.

    Strategy and definition, user research, information architecture, UX and UI, and design systems. We write the questions before we draw the screens, and we build accessibility in from the start rather than auditing it back in later.

    • —Product and feature strategy
    • —User research and usability testing
    • —Information architecture and flows
    • —UX/UI design and prototypes
    • —Design systems and component libraries
    • —Accessibility (WCAG) built in
  2. 02

    Engineering and infrastructure

    Making it actually run, safely, at scale.

    Production builds, secure backends, public-data ingestion, APIs, encryption and identity, and the intricate parts that decide whether software holds up: auth flows, retries, error states; the things that break at scale. We work in regulated domains where money and personal data are real.

    • —Full-stack web and mobile builds
    • —APIs and data pipelines
    • —Encryption, identity, and access control
    • —Cloud infrastructure and deployment
    • —Security and compliance engineering
    • —Performance and reliability
  3. 03

    AI products and domain models

    AI on the backend, doing real work.

    We build AI into products where it earns its place: document classification and extraction, domain-specific models, and the pipelines around them. We have shipped models that read tax forms and power government workflows (not chatbots bolted onto a marketing page).

    • —Document classification and extraction
    • —Domain-specific model training and tuning
    • —Retrieval and evaluation pipelines
    • —Human-in-the-loop review tooling
    • —Cost and latency budgeting
  4. 04

    Service design and practice consulting

    For organizations bringing complex systems to people who shouldn't have to translate.

    Mapping services across teams and touchpoints, facilitation, alignment, design and engineering operations, and accessibility audits. The work of making a complicated system feel like one coherent thing to the person on the other side of it.

    • —Service blueprints and journey maps
    • —Workshop facilitation and alignment
    • —Design and engineering operations
    • —Accessibility audits and remediation

Teams & operations

We make your team more efficient

Not every problem needs a new product. Sometimes the work is helping a team adopt AI sensibly, untangle the systems they already pay for, or finally write down how anything works. We do that too, and we keep it lean.

  1. 01

    AI tooling and team enablement

    Teach your team to work with AI without lighting money on fire.

    We help teams use AI efficiently and safely. That starts with an honest audit of how AI is being used today (with the financial and security flags called out plainly) and ends with a toolset that fits what you actually need to accomplish and what you can afford to spend doing it. Reasonable, approachable recommendations, personalized to you and your team, not a pile of subscriptions nobody asked for.

    • —Current-usage audit with cost and security flags
    • —Right-sized tool and workflow recommendations
    • —Hands-on team training and playbooks
    • —Solution architecture matched to budget
    • —Guardrails for sensitive data
  2. 02

    Systems and file organization

    Organization that actually sticks this time, across whatever tools you run on.

    We design organization systems around how your team actually works — naming, structure, ownership, and the conventions that keep things from sliding back into chaos a month later. It doesn’t matter whether you live in Drive, Notion, Asana, Dropbox, Teams, Trello, Airtable, Monday, Salesforce, Confluence, or some tangle of all of them. As one client put it to us: “I’ve hired six people to organize my systems into something we’ll actually use, and nobody has been able to make it happen.” And because Holly spent years building role-based access control, data security, and provisioning systems, we treat who-can-see-what as part of the design, not an afterthought.

    • —Restructure across whatever tools you run on
    • —Naming and folder conventions
    • —Role-based access, permissions, and provisioning (RBAC)
    • —Templates and recurring-work setup
    • —A maintenance plan so it lasts
  3. 03

    Documentation

    The thing everyone needs and no one wants to write.

    Documentation is a perennial unmet need, and often the contract hire every team wishes they could make. We love it. We write the docs, and we don’t stop there. We design the systems of organization and collaboration that keep documentation alive: where it lives, who owns it, and how it stays current instead of going stale in a wiki.

    • —Technical and process documentation
    • —Runbooks and onboarding guides
    • —Best-practice playbooks
    • —Documentation systems and ownership
    • —Templates and contribution workflows
    • —Audits of what's missing or stale

Start a conversation

Not sure which of these you need? Tell us what you’re trying to do. We’ll tell you honestly whether it’s a project, a cleanup, or a conversation.

Start a conversation →

We answer every message, usually within a day.