In January, I wrote our priorities for 2020: deepen health tech, scale trev, invest in a design system, and grow the team carefully. Then the world changed. Looking back, the priorities held. The path to them was nothing like we planned.
What You Need to Know
- RIVER delivered across health tech, agriculture, and sports sectors despite a fully remote year
- Edison Health's genomic reporting platform hit a major milestone
- trev grew its user base and validated the offline-first architecture
- The team operated fully remote for nine months without losing a person or a client
Edison Health (Genomic Reporting)
The work we've done with Edison Health this year has been some of the most technically demanding and personally meaningful of our careers. Building software that helps people understand their genomic data isn't just engineering. It's responsibility.
We shipped a major platform update in Q3 that improved report generation speed and added new visualisation capabilities for clinicians. The domain knowledge we've built over two years is compounding. Conversations with the Edison team that would have taken hours in 2018 now take minutes because we understand the clinical context.
The health tech sector accelerated during COVID, for obvious reasons. Organisations that had digital health infrastructure were able to maintain service continuity. Those that didn't scrambled. Our work with Edison positioned them on the right side of that divide.
The design challenges in health tech are unlike anything else. Getting it right matters in a way that goes beyond usability.
Rainui Teihotua
Chief Creative Officer
trev (Farm Reporting)
trev had a growth year. Not explosive growth. Steady, word-of-mouth growth that feels right for the market. We added features based on direct feedback from farmers and rural professionals who use the platform daily.
The offline-first architecture we invested in paid dividends. Farmers in areas with poor connectivity could work uninterrupted. When they reached a connection, data synced automatically. This wasn't a feature. It was the feature. We wrote about the lessons from building software for agriculture in October.
The product-market fit question is answered. trev solves a real problem for a real market. The question for 2021 is growth: how to reach the broader market without losing the relationship-based adoption that got us here.
Other Projects
We delivered work for Oceania Football Confederation, building tools for football administration across the Pacific region. The cross-cultural and multi-timezone aspects of this work stretched our delivery capabilities in good ways.
We contributed to the Mental Health Foundation's digital presence, work that felt especially relevant this year. When mental health services needed to reach people digitally because they couldn't reach them in person, the quality of that digital experience mattered enormously.
The Design System
We committed to building a design system in January and we did. It's not complete. Design systems are never complete. But the foundations are in place. Shared tokens, core components, pattern documentation. New projects start from a consistent base instead of a blank canvas.
35%
estimated reduction in UI development time on projects using our shared design system
Source: Internal measurement, RIVER, Q4 2020
The real test came when a developer moved from the Edison project to trev mid-year. Instead of spending a week learning new patterns, they were productive within a day. The components were familiar. The conventions were shared. That's the return on investment that justified the effort.
The Team
Nobody left. In a year where the world turned upside down, our team stayed intact. Not because they had nowhere else to go. Because we invested in making this a place worth staying at.
The Three Literacies framework became a defining characteristic of how we develop our people. Health awareness, financial understanding, and cross-discipline technical knowledge. The monthly sessions became something the team looked forward to rather than endured.
We hired two people in the second half of the year. Both remotely. Both onboarded remotely. Both integrated successfully, which speaks to the onboarding practices the team developed on the fly. Hiring remotely expanded our talent pool beyond Auckland, which we'll continue doing in 2021.
Remote Delivery, Matured
We went remote in March as a crisis response. By December, it's just how we work. The rituals are established. The tools are stable. The culture has adapted.
The thing I'm proudest of isn't the work output. It's how the team handled the uncertainty. They showed up every day, supported each other through lockdowns, managed their energy through a relentless year, and delivered excellent work for every client. Nobody burned out badly. Nobody checked out. The stretch culture we've built over years was tested at a level we never anticipated, and it held.
Looking at 2021
We're entering next year with a stronger team, a validated design system, deeper domain expertise in health tech and agriculture, and a remote delivery capability that's no longer experimental.
The priorities for 2020 were the right priorities. The execution was different from anything we imagined. That's the lesson of this year: plan for direction, not destination. The direction was right. The destination moved. We moved with it.
On to 2021.