Every January we do the same exercise. Lock a room, pull out the whiteboards, and ask three questions: what's working, what's not, and where do we want to be in twelve months? This year the answers came faster than usual, which is either a sign of clarity or a sign we're not asking hard enough questions.
What You Need to Know
- RIVER is doubling down on health tech and agriculture software in 2020
- We're investing in design systems to scale delivery across multiple projects
- Team growth is deliberate, not fast, with a focus on sustainability
- Enterprise delivery in NZ is maturing and we want to be ahead of it
Where We Are
2019 was a year of growth. More projects, bigger clients, harder problems. We shipped genomic reporting software for a health tech company. We built farm reporting tools for an industry that still runs on paper. We expanded the team without breaking the culture, which is the thing I'm most proud of.
Revenue was up. Delivery quality was consistent. Nobody burned out badly enough to leave. Those aren't exciting metrics. They're the right ones.
The Four Priorities
1. Go Deeper in Health Tech
We've been working with Edison Health on genomic reporting, and the more time we spend in health technology, the more we see the gap between what's possible and what's been built. Health systems are drowning in data they can't use. Clinicians want tools that respect their workflow, not tools that create more of it.
$8.7B
projected NZ health sector IT spend by 2022
Source: IDC Health Insights, Asia/Pacific Health IT Spending Guide, 2019
This isn't a pivot. It's a deepening. We have domain knowledge now. We understand the regulatory constraints, the data sensitivity requirements, the clinical workflow patterns. That knowledge compounds. We want to build on it rather than spread thin across new verticals.
2. Scale trev (Farm Reporting)
trev, our farm reporting platform, proved the concept in 2019. Farmers and rural professionals need digital tools that understand their world, not generic software with an agricultural skin on top. The question for 2020 is whether we can take what works for early adopters and make it work for the broader market.
The niche SaaS lessons we wrote about last year are directly applicable here. The market is small. Relationships matter more than marketing. Depth beats breadth.
3. Invest in Design Systems
We're now running enough concurrent projects that inconsistency is becoming expensive. Different patterns, different component styles, different approaches to the same problems. Rainui's been pushing for a unified design system for months and he's right. It's time.
The goal isn't a component library for its own sake. It's a shared language between design and engineering that lets us move faster without sacrificing quality. When a new developer joins a project, they should recognise the patterns immediately.
4. Grow the Team (Carefully)
We could hire faster. We're choosing not to. Every person we add changes the culture. At our size, one bad hire is felt by everyone. One great hire lifts everyone.
The plan is two to three new people this year. Engineers who can operate in enterprise contexts. People who can sit in a room with a CTO and hold their own. The technical bar is high but the communication bar is higher.
We hire for the room, not the desk. The best code in the world is useless if you can't explain why you built it that way.
Isaac Rolfe
Managing Director
What We're Not Doing
We're not chasing new verticals. We're not building a product studio. We're not scaling for scale's sake.
The enterprise market in New Zealand is big enough to sustain a focused team that does excellent work. We don't need to be everything to everyone. We need to be the obvious choice for the specific problems we solve.
That's the plan. Simple enough to remember. Hard enough to execute well. Check back in December.