About Studio Conners
Our philosophy
We believe the best work comes from relationships that get better with time. Context accumulates. Trust grows. Conversations become more candid. You no longer have to explain the whole world every time you call.
Relationships before projects.
We would rather build a relationship than win a project. A project can end and disappear. A good relationship carries its history forward, so every conversation can begin a little further ahead than the last one.
People, not accounts.
Companies are made of people. We care much more about finding someone curious, knowledgeable, open, and willing to think with us than about titles, org charts, or the size of an account.
Help first. Money follows.
We do not want a transaction to be the reason a relationship exists. We would rather be useful first, see whether trust develops, and let commitment grow because both sides want the relationship to continue.
Trust should make us more candid.
The better we know each other, the more honest the work should become. A useful relationship gives us permission to say what we actually think — including when the answer is inconvenient, uncertain, or simply: don't do it.
An open door matters.
Not every useful thought arrives during a scheduled meeting. We want the kind of relationship where either side can say, ‘I was thinking about you and noticed something.’ Some of the best work begins that way.
We would rather be deeply useful to a handful of people than lightly useful to hundreds.
Our people
Shawn Conners
Founder
I’ve spent most of my working life trying to understand complicated things.
My career started in software in the late 1990s and has taken me through small creative studios, consulting, local government, Nike, federal research, startups, and leadership of a software development team. Along the way I’ve built websites, apps, databases, research systems, automation, AI pipelines, and plenty of things that don’t fit neatly into any of those categories.
But the technology was never really the common thread.
The part that has always interested me most is figuring out how the whole thing works — the people, the technology, the rules, the history, the assumptions, the strange workarounds, and the connections between them. I like getting close enough to a situation to build a picture of it, asking questions until that picture makes sense, and noticing possibilities that are hard to see when you live inside the system every day.
Studio Conners is built around that way of working.
Technology is familiar territory for me, especially software, data, automation, and AI. But I don’t begin with technology. I begin by trying to understand what is actually going on.
I live and work in Remsen, Iowa.
Studio Conners is intentionally small. Shawn leads the work and is the person clients work with directly.