Business sense, engineering discipline.
Matt Manley founded Manley Studios in 2024 to build finished products with partners who know their markets, and to take on a small number of client engagements.
Matt has been building software since 1998. He also holds an MBA and a PhD in Management Information Systems, the field that studies how organizations and the people in them actually use software. Most engineers can go deep on one side of that line; Matt works on both, in depth, and spends much of his time translating between them.
His expertise is the process of software engineering: turning requirements into quality working software. That starts with what a business needs, who will use the product, and what it is worth to them. It continues through the technical design, from the architecture down to the details, each choice weighed against what it will cost to run and what it needs to earn. It ends with software that holds up after launch.
Twenty-eight years of systems that had to work
Matt spent fourteen years building systems in industry, including audit and forecasting platforms at Novell, healthcare financial data at Health Care Insights, and private-cloud and compute infrastructure at Wells Fargo Bank. When he moved into academia he kept consulting, designing and building systems for other organizations alongside teaching. There has been no year since 1998 in which he was not building software, and on every studio product he is still in the code: directing it, inspecting it, and answering for what ships.
He has taught at Texas A&M University and at Brigham Young University–Idaho, where he is a Professor of Computer Science. Teaching keeps him practiced at explaining technical choices to the people who have to live with them.
What a partner gets
- Requirements worked out in business terms before any code: the buyer, the problem, and what solving it is worth
- Technical design, from the architecture down to the details, weighed against operating cost and revenue
- A disciplined engineering process that ships finished software at speed, not a demo
- Someone who stays to run and maintain what was built
Elsewhere
Education
- PhD, Management Information Systems
- MBA
- BA, Psychology and Art History
Have a market you know well?
Tell me about it. A few answers help me see whether there is a product in it.
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