Thank you for 15 years
TDF began as The Development Factory. A partnership formed over a coffee and a handshake at the corner of King St. and Spadina Ave in Toronto, Ontario in 2010.
At that time, very few brands and agencies staffed their own software engineers. When they did, they usually had just one or two developers who struggled to keep up with the hectic pace of delivering concurrent projects and the pressure of rapidly changing technologies.
Our offer was as simple as the name: if you want experienced coders, come to The Development Factory.
In our early years we collaborated with award-winning agencies like john st, Saatchi & Saatchi, and BBDO, and delivered memorable and results-driven interactive experiences for major brands like McDonald's, Best Buy, and 20th Century Fox.
Our partners kept us busy, but the nature of the work left much to be desired.
Most of our projects were campaign-based and short-lived. We quickly found that the value we placed on architecture, usability, and clean code was rarely defendable to our clients, who mostly just wanted it to be "good enough" for a few weeks.
Our first pivot was away from marketers and advertisers toward custom software solutions for small and medium businesses, and a selfishly motivated geographic move from snowy Toronto to sunny Los Angeles in 2013.
Over the next few years we built revenue-generating products and business automation tools for clients in healthcare, compliance consulting, and media. Our business grew exponentially, but we still hadn't escaped the pains of project-culture.
If our campaign work was plagued by its ephemeral nature, our software engagements were condemned to the limitations of project-thinking. Namely, the misguided perception that every requirement (presently known and future anticipated) can be gathered upfront, designed flawlessly, and built to last.
But if our clients misunderstood the inherently iterative and ongoing nature of product work, wasn't it our job to help them to understand?
Toward Trust, TaaS, and Transformation.
In 2019, we published a well-circulated article on a better way to negotiate software contracts.
We flagged the flaws of the "fixed-cost conundrum" and advocated for an approach we had adopted, which was transforming the way we engaged with our clients.
We abandoned fixed fees for fluid contracts triangulated around three levers:
What are the business objectives?
Which cross-functional roles must we fill?
How fast do we want to go, and for how long?
We changed our name to TDF, called our model Team-as-a-Service (TaaS), and applied it to help dozens of startups and mature businesses learn to become product-minded.
TaaS is integrated. Outsourced software development is not.
TaaS is an approach that requires trust, and values learning. You have to share the belief that teams can rally around goals and deliver the work needed to meet those goals (even if the specifics of the work haven't yet been defined), and embrace the principles of collaboration, iteration, and incremental value delivery.
Through TaaS, TDF helped organizations of all sizes transform their cultures and their delivery processes.
We evolved from "the people you call when you need development done right," into trusted coaches and technology advisors that helped our clients achieve performance excellence by systematically and continuously improving their people, processes, and products.
To make an end is to make a beginning.
Fifteen years of service is a significant achievement. It tells a story of survival, growth, commitment, and change.
In December 2025, on our own terms, we said goodbye to our last client and the business we spent our professionally formative years building.
When we started The Development Factory, we just wanted to be known as "a great dev shop." But through our own continuous improvement and feedback loops, we became so much more.
To everyone who supported us on our journey— our employees and contractors, our clients, our mentors, the universe— thank you.
Suzanne and Andrew
Co-Founders
