Case Studies

Fashion Retailer

  • New leadership team recently installed
  • Concerns about the ROI delivered by the digital team
  • Changes to products seemed out of line with wider business strategy
  • Open questions about the capability of the existing team to communicate a response and turn around performance
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  • Full review of team capability and digital operations
  • Conducted interviews across entire digital team and beyond
  • Mapped processes and touch points to show how things worked in practice vs team perception
  • Met with third-party providers in development, analytics and optimisation
  • Assessed details of external contracts and working practices
  • Mapped skills gaps across the team
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  • Recommended training and education for technology team
  • Proposed new hire to bridge a specific skills gap and supported hiring of the role
  • Identified key contractual flaws driving undesirable behaviours from third party vendors
  • Delivered recommendations for improved communication and ways of working
  • £120m turnover
  • 1,000+ employees

"This was exactly what we needed. A very clear diagnosis, and well-articulated actions we could immediately apply."

Ground Hazard Risk Assessments

  • New Private Equity investor
  • Slow speed to market was creating commercial pressures
  • Multiple release candidates were buggy and failing
  • Questions about capability of the development team and quality of the product produced
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  • Code review and interview with lead developer
  • Assessed code delivery practices and processes
  • Met with founders and interrogated business, product & technology strategy
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  • Identified serious issues in code quality and release processes
  • Guided the development team to release a reduced-scope version of the product to customers, securing at risk contracts
  • Delivered clear, concise actions to the founders around technical risk reduction and how to predictably deliver
  • Aligned commercial side of the business around a coherent strategy
  • Supported path to an eventual acquisition
  • Private Equity backed startup
  • Successful exit 18 months after involvement

"Thank you. While it's concerning to be directly faced with these risks, we can finally see a route to market."

Online Travel Agent

  • Private Equity Backed travel group, with multiple brands
  • Launched update to website, and mobile SEO immediately began to fail
  • Organic traffic reduced ~30% overnight
  • Development team continually deploying 'fixes' then rolling back in a trial and error manner
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  • Full review of data and analytics and code changes to understand scale and cause of the issue
  • Idetified root cause of the problem and delivered fast remedial action
  • Gave an assessment of the mitigation and recovery aproaches employed by the external development team
  • Advised on vendor selection and consequences of technology choices
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  • Organic traffic immediately beagn to recover, quickly reaching previous benchmarks
  • Implemented longer-term fixes and select suitable vendors for future support
  • Private Equity backed
  • £40m turnover

"Reassuring to know exactly what happened and that we're on track to recover."

Shipping Recruitment Platform

  • Initial seed investment runway tightening
  • MVP remained stuck in beta, meaning a next funding round was close to impossible
  • The product was unstable and full of bugs
  • Offshore development team were unresponsive; little confidence in their capability to fix the issues in a reasonable time
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  • Audited skills and capabilities of the development team and initiated appropriate training
  • Initiated a restructure of the code base to reduce risk and improve scalability
  • Introduced behavioural analytics and established KPIs for user engagement and data quality
  • Led a short series of development cycles to launch the app and embed solid development principles
  • Recommended and led recruitment for personnel changes to better position the team for the future
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  • Successful product launch within tight funding constraints
  • Decision-making criteria used to prioritise and allocate resource made visible to investors
  • Significant growth of the user base through organic marketing, capturing 10% market share
  • New tech lead installed to provide in-house oversight for off-shore, remote developer resource
  • Committed the team to regular, straightforward Investor communication, providing a bespoke template for exec reporting
  • Seed funded startup
  • Funding runway expiring with little chance of a second round

"A unique experience. Nobody has ever challenged us like this before, and we're thinking about how we approach building the product completely differently."

Location Search Platform

  • Legacy digital projects were stuck in progress with no path to delivery
  • Data management challenges creating operational inefficiencies
  • A five-year-old custom CRM project to resolve this had no clear path to launch
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  • Recommended & implemented tools for capturing data to improve decision-making
  • Revamped third-party development practices
  • Drove retirement of redundant systems and legacy projects, simplifying workflow and prioritisation
  • Overhauled analytics
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  • Saw significant improvement in time to market for new capabilities
  • Long-standing data project successfully launched
  • Operations streamlined and costs reduced
  • Supported the team to deliver a tailored and predictable roadmap for development
  • Owner managed, secured £4M funding
  • Overcame a 5 year delay in new product launch