Together, we build.
The established way to build technology products is to plug in an unknown team or leader, and off you go. This isn’t how we work.
In short, we don’t do disconnected.
Our Specialist Builders engage, share and connect with a value system aligned with yours. We call it The Way. Think of it as Your Team + Specialist Leaders working together to build leading technology products.
Because when collaboration and the right culture fit are the biggest barriers to your success, we need to find a better way.
Our Principles
- Buy over build until proven otherwise.
- Adopt the most popular open source framework.
- Prototypes are experiments. A prototype is not a version one of a piece of software.
- Reduce the scope of a release to the point of being uncomfortable, and get that reduced scope in front of users immediately.
- Once a prototype has shown that something is interesting to your users, add the most simple version of it to your product and elicit more feedback.
- Split logic into team-shaped libraries or repos, avoiding over-engineered microservices.
- Maintain proportionate compliance until you have users and audit feedback, because without clients your risk is minimal.
- Stress test regularly, and fix the bits that fall over. Don’t try to overly ‘architect for scale’.
- Keep the rocket simple, but invest in the launch platform (automated tests and release pipelines).
- Strong teams of engineers and designers build the product, but the vision stays with you, the product owner.
- Product owners drive prioritisation by combining broad user conversations with analysed application data.
- A good product owner lays out a vision for the product and ensure what is built is actually needed.
- Look to the state of the art: today's ecosystem is is abundant with open source and low cost tools instead of reinventing the wheel.
- Communication is key to progress. Cut friction: ditch email and use a channel-based communication platform instead.
- Getting staff trained & certified is a relatively cheap short cut to more effective communication
- A culture of writing in paramount. Encourage people to write down and distribute plans, ideas and proposals.
- A quick win towards becoming a more agile organisation is to assign an explicit person, who is tasked - and authorised - with making the office IT experience better.
- Hold regular demos - at sprint’s end or another cadence - to show stakeholders the product’s progress.
- Hire serious engineers, some with experience outside your industry
- Outsourcing is a way of getting access to talent, not a cost save play
- Guardrails not speed-bumps
- Adopting the state of the art in the middle is more important than innovation on the edge
- Technology and the Business is a partnership
- Support a transition from project management to product management
- The ratio of builder to administrator to manager must be tracked and reported
- Reorganise into two-pizza, agile product teams
- Effective team processes stem from effective feedback loops
- Engineers thrive on emancipation
- Fast fish eat slow fish
- Builders do not need to be taught how to be agile and innovative, they need to be allowed
- Trust your builders to make good choices for their tools
Three ways to engage
There is no one way to work with us, but there are three key moments where we can help. Flexibility and agility are paramount, so we created a solution that works for you, when you need us.
Get products off the ground
Start-ups or growth-stage companies looking for strategic support when speed, flexibility and specialism are required.
Pre Series
Prototype to MVP
CTO as Co-Thinker
Get them moving
Exploratory and experimental – our CTOs update and evolve key elements of your product as you pivot to quickly capture new markets, new audiences and new growth goals.
Venture Build
Temporary Gaps
Turn-around
Inspire change
We put the world’s best CTOs inside your organisation to evaluate tech stack, team capability or essential strategic alignment with the business.
Technical Due Diligence
CTO Evaluation
Board Advisory