Did You Know:

lucidLIFT has developed a patent-pending, AI-driven software platform that monitors and guides team performance, collects hundreds of facts, and outputs a variety of actionable metrics and insights that help leadership keep the team on track. It’s like having a virtual agile coach 24/7/365! lucidLIFT makes it easy for technical and business leaders to scale consistent, predictable software processes across their entire enterprise.

Paul Carlson and Mark Strange, both life-long Minnesotans, founded lucidLIFT in 2016. Prior to founding lucidLIFT, Carlson was a CTO at various Twin Cities companies, and he was often brought on to do technology team turnarounds. Strange was an independent consultant and an expert in modern, agile software development practices. The two worked together on several successful technology turnarounds. Strange originally came from a lean manufacturing background.

“When I moved into software development,” says Strange, “I was shocked that most software teams weren’t applying lean principles.” Even after the agile revolution of the late ’90s and early ’00s, most businesses still aren’t benefiting as they could be. In working together over the years, Carlson and Strange saw a pattern. While most software teams said they were doing agile software development, very few were applying lean principles correctly and consistently. Most were still struggling with predictability.

Business leaders were largely disconnected from the technical teams that were building their products and tools. Decisions were being made based on hunches and feelings rather than on facts and data. Late projects and missed deadlines were still the norm. Carlson and Strange saw another pattern. “The problem was,” says Strange, “as soon as we would leave, the changes we put in place had a tendency to unwind.”

The co-founders realized that it would be a great help if business leaders had the data they needed to understand what their teams were working on and how they were performing. So, in 2016, Carlson and Strange founded lucidLIFT to address these problems and build solutions that scale well in large organizations. Strange and Carlson have perfected a particular application of agile principles and scrum mechanics over the years, and they use these ideas to help their customers build higher quality software faster and at a much lower cost than with other methods.

Their special source is their AI-driven coaching software platform that provides agile training, tips, and alerts to team members while helping leaders understand how their teams are doing. As the team develops a product, data is collected and software generates readable, actionable alerts, reports, and dashboards which help the team and its leadership understand what improvements could be made or where corrective action is needed. In combination with consulting services, this software allows lucidLIFT to help their clients build a world- class agile software development practice at scale.

“The overall effect,” says Strange, “is to squeeze the waste out of software processes and create teams that predictably produce high-quality software.” The software also prevents backsliding, so the teams continue to perform at a high level. lucidLIFT shipped version 1.0 in 2018 and is currently incorporating customer feedback into version 2.0. Their first version of lucidLIFT has analyzed over 50,000 backlog items and generated over 1 million unique project insights into project and team performance.

Companies in the Minnesota tech community have been willing to try out lucidLIFT’s method and pilot their software, for which lucidLIFT is grateful. Carlson and Strange say they appreciate the local support, and they hope to have a positive impact on software development across the country and around the world. For more information, visit lucidlift.com.