Toptal Blog

Consultants often struggle to find new, solid clients. We asked Steve Blank, the founder of the Lean Startup movement (and someone who has helped hundreds of companies get a better product to market faster and worked with dozens of consultants along the way) how consultants can attract clients.

Steve’s advice is a bit counter-intuitive. But it’s something that Toptal’s best consultants have already been doing for years.

With today’s rapid pace of technological progress, organizational change is perhaps more necessary than it ever has been. But change is hard. Countless studies show that more often than not, corporations fail to implement change successfully, losing money, time, and employee morale in the process.

Based on his 20+ years of international finance experience across a range of industries, and over a decade of experience as a CFO, Toptal Management Consultant Edwin Petersen outlines his thoughts on why change management often fails and how to get it right.

Keeping your Android codebase maintainable as your codebase grows can be a challenge. In this article, Toptal Freelance Android Developer Abhishek Tyagi shows how to combine MVVM with Clean Architecture—the latter as described by Robert C. Martin—to write decoupled, testable, and maintainable code.

What makes a winning UX portfolio? More than a showcase of skills, a UX designer’s portfolio is an opportunity for them to create an enjoyable user experience as well as demonstrate their UX mastery.

As UX strategy and design become increasingly important, the challenge of incorporating UX specialists into Agile methodologies becomes equally important.

In this article, Toptal Freelance UX Designer Debbie Levitt explains how UX designers and creative teams can be effectively incorporated at all stages of Agile development.

iOS developers love the power of UIKit, and animating a UIView is usually fairly easy. However, if you want to chain animations together and set up dependencies between them, your code can quickly become difficult to read with many nested closures and indentation levels.

In this article, I’ll explore how to apply the power of a reactive framework such as RxSwift to make that code look much cleaner as well as easier to read and follow. My client wanted a story told through a sequence of animations rather than by playing a pre-rendered video, and with RxSwift, we easily tweaked it to perfection.

Burn rate is one of the simplest, yet most fundamental metrics that investors and startups focus on. It pertains to the total cash spend of the business per month, which demonstrates both growth progress and potential runway that the business has to survive. This article introduces the burn rate concept and the tactics that can be applied to optimize it.

On this week’s Design Talks we discuss research in action with Caitria O’Neill, a UX researcher at Airbnb. She studies people’s relationships with technology and how they behave with digital products.

Design thinking goes beyond the usual problem-solving focus of most UI and UX designers and adds the aspect of deep empathy for the user to the entire product design lifecycle, increasing the prospect of success.