Building AI products that help people think, work, and decide.

Things That is a London-based product engineering practice. Over 20 years working with teams at Google, IBM, Kpler, and Air New Zealand, designing systems, building interfaces, making complex decisions feel simple. The focus is on human-first AI: technology that reduces cognitive load, feels intuitive to use, and respects how people actually work. This is work that sits between product strategy and hands-on engineering, with no handoffs in between.

Things That builds AI products that treat the human side as seriously as the technical side: interfaces that feel conversational and forgiving, systems that explain their reasoning, technology that fits into how people actually work rather than forcing them to adapt.

If you're building AI products and need help with the human side of the engineering, get in touch at hello@thingsthat.com.

Things That is a product engineering practice focused on building systems that help people make sense of complexity. Over the past 20 years, we've worked with teams at Google, IBM, Air New Zealand, Kpler, EE, News UK, Tesco, and The Economist, sitting in the space between product strategy and hands-on engineering, designing systems and shipping interfaces that make complex decisions feel simple.

Most engineering work fails at the interface between machine and human. The technology might be sound, but the experience is confusing, the system doesn't explain itself, or it breaks trust when it makes a mistake.

Our work is hands-on, writing code, reviewing pull requests, designing schemas, and testing edge cases, but always with the human experience in mind. We're not consultants who hand off to developers. We're product engineers and designers who think strategically about what users need, then build it, from architecture to APIs to interfaces to production deployment.

If you're building AI products and need someone who thinks about the human side as seriously as the technical side, get in touch at hello@thingsthat.com.

#insights

2025-12-13

Analysing Christmas Adverts

Mass Vision is a persona-based video sentiment tool: a synthetic screening room for ads. You upload a film, synthetic personas watch it, and narrate reactions moment by moment, explaining why, tied to identity, lived experience, ethics, and context. The output is a tension map (not a safe average): where the same scene splits audiences, who feels seen, and who feels repelled. The Christmas ads analysis shows why this matters: social sentiment gave broad takes after launch; Mass Vision shows the segment mechanics underneath, at specific moments. Run it in minutes, iterate while changes are still cheap, and stop learning the hard way in public.

analysing-christmas-adverts

#live#AI

2025-10-17

Mass

My mum thinks it's cool. My friends think it's as odd as a cat with wings. Getting human opinion is hard. It's time-consuming, expensive, and we're not sure we can trust the result. That's why we built Mass, a platform to deploy hundreds of synthetic human personas that think, reason, and respond like the target audience. They're brutally honest and unfiltered, giving a real sense of what audiences wants in minutes, not months. And at a fraction of the cost. Understand perspectives, validate messaging, explore positioning, and more before committing to the real human research.