Ranked as One of the Top UX Agencies, Austin-based Mighty is All Set to Scale to a Whole New Level

“Our clients come to us with problems; none are identical and we see each as an opportunity.” - Jason Garrett

From well-known brands looking to fine-tune their process, to start-ups seeking to craft their experiences from the ground up, to all variations in between; Mighty’s approach to solving  problems is not just beautiful – but meaningful and intuitive as well.

Mighty. is a strategy and design company focused on creating user-centred experiences for software, systems, and services. The company was incorporated in 2015 and is headquartered in Austin, Texas.

Jason Garrett, Mighty. Co-founder/CEO, spoke exclusively to The Silicon Review. Below is an excerpt.

Why was the company set up? And how did you expand your company and its offerings over the years?

My business partner and I (Jon Pritzl) formed the company so that we could conduct business in a way that aligned with our values. We wanted to treat all clients equally regardless of size or prestige and with Mighty, we’re able to do that. Rather than expand our offerings, it’s been about narrowing our focus and digging deeper into our ‘go beyond beautiful’ design ethos. This means that no matter how complex a problem is, our objective is to craft and deliver a simple solution that resonates with users\customers. Over the last 18 months, we’ve dialed down on approaching all digital and physical interactions as experiences. We believe almost all experiences have problems and can be improved upon or fine-tuned. By viewing challenges through the lens of our beyond beautiful approach, we’ve built the company around talent and processes that can solve those experience problems in an intuitive way regardless of complexity.

How successful was your first project roll on? Share the experience.

Our first project as a company was a cybersecurity platform for Facebook called Harbor. It was a fantastic experience and was very successful from a team standpoint – theirs and ours. We all shared a common vision and goal and worked to make it a reality. Speaking for myself, the project was an eye-opener for me and showed me the value of user research. The original concept started out as one thing and radically morphed into something different due to the research we conducted. It turned out that users needed something different than we originally planned on building. We wouldn’t have known this and would have gone in the wrong direction if we didn’t take the time to gather, analyze, and apply user data. Even though Harbor was ultimately never released, some of the concepts, workflows, and paradigms made their way into ThreatExchange and Workplace. All of the groundwork we laid was leveraged and put to good use elsewhere. That was extremely gratifying.

A small business/company may or may not function as expected. It takes everything to stand out and compete in the business world, was it the same for your company?

Yes. Honestly, I can’t think of any viable companies that didn’t experience significant problems early on. With Mighty, we’ve been fortunate in that we do our work exceptionally well and others have taken notice. It’s no secret that there are tons of design companies out there (and quite a few of them are great). Our people stand-out, both personally and professionally – they are our differentiator.

What are your company’s core values and how did they help you to succeed?

As I mentioned earlier, we built Mighty around our personal values – how we want to be treated and how we endeavor to treat others. From doing business that way, we started to receive fairly consistent feedback from clients that honed in on a few areas. Personally, I’ve always disliked ‘canned’ mission statements and values since they’re rarely real or lived out beyond the board room. Because of that, Jon and I decided to focus on the client feedback we received most often to help guide the creation of our company values. The areas we received the most positive feedback in were expressed as authenticity, growth, balance, and simplicity. In short, we strive for honesty in all interactions, humility in problem-solving, true work-life balance, and simple solutions to complex problems.

How do you maintain your customers’ trust and loyalty?

Companies that don’t have fantastic customer service don’t resonate with me. I am not interested in providing a fantastic service with sub-par client relationship skills. We’re absolutely focused on doing all we can to make our customers successful and we go above and beyond to do so. In everything we do, we treat our clients’ business like our own.

As a question on sustainability, where do you see your company a couple of years from now?

In a couple of years, I see us staying the course by continuing to work with companies whose focus is on putting out products and experiences that positively impact people’s lives. We’ll do this by advising them on how to do so from both design and technology standpoints. From a futurist perspective, we believe that impact should trump technology; just because blockchain and artificial intelligence exist doesn’t mean that those technologies should automatically be in each and every product out there; we pride ourselves on taking a strategic versus a reactionary ‘everyone’s doing it’ stance when crafting products.

Mighty. Leadership: A Dynamic Duo

Jason Garrett, Co-founder/CEO: Jason’s a family man; a native Texan who grew up in southern California who enjoys music, the outdoors, and old-school cinema. Oddly enough, Mr. Garrett enjoys the occasional dose of high-octane metal (e.g. Mastodon).

JP (Jon Pritzl), Co-founder/CXO: JP is a resident baseball fan — watches nearly all 162 Tigers’ games — loves dogs, enjoys a good whiskey, and could eat breakfast every meal. He’s survived a Tough Mudder and sprint triathlon.

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