Every year I write one of these. What we did, what we learned, what's next. This year's version started as a straightforward retrospective and then November happened. So this is two pieces in one: a genuine review of what we delivered, and an honest admission that the ground shifted under our feet in the last month.
What You Need to Know
- 2022 was a strong delivery year: Mental Health Foundation scaled to serve over 1 million annual users, Oceania Football expanded across the Pacific, Trev continued steady growth
- Edison Health wound down gracefully, completing its lifecycle with dignity and proper knowledge transfer
- The team stayed together through a brutal talent market, which we count as one of the year's biggest achievements
- The last month of 2022 introduced a variable that makes every forward-looking statement in this piece tentative
The Work
Mental Health Foundation
This partnership continues to be some of our most meaningful work. The platform now serves well over a million people annually. The scale has demanded design and infrastructure decisions that pushed us into genuine enterprise territory: performance optimisation, accessibility at scale, content architecture that serves diverse audiences.
Designing for a million users who are often accessing the platform in vulnerable moments is a different kind of challenge. It keeps you honest.
Rainui Teihotua
Chief Creative Officer
Oceania Football
The platform expanded to serve additional Pacific nations this year. Each new federation brought unique requirements while needing to operate within a shared system. It's the kind of multi-tenant, multi-context challenge that's technically interesting and genuinely useful.
Edison Health
We wound down Edison Health in 2022. Not every product has an indefinite lifespan, and knowing when to conclude something gracefully is as important as knowing how to start it. The knowledge transfer was thorough, the users were supported through the transition, and the codebase was documented for whoever maintains it next.
It's always bittersweet closing something you built. But a clean ending is better than a slow decline.
Trev
Trev continues to grow steadily. It's never going to be a unicorn and it was never meant to be. It solves a specific problem for a specific market and it does it well. Steady revenue, low churn, minimal drama. The sustainable growth model we wrote about is what Trev actually looks like in practice.
Real Groovy
Our work with Real Groovy continues to be one of the most enjoyable engagements in the portfolio. Physical retail meets digital commerce, powered by genuine enthusiasm for the product. The kind of project that reminds you why you got into this work.
The Team
In January I wrote that keeping good people was a priority. It was harder than I expected. The NZ tech talent market in 2022 was the most competitive I've seen. Remote work opened up international opportunities for our people, and the salary gap between NZ and Australia or the US is significant.
We lost a couple of people we wanted to keep. We also retained people we were worried about losing. On balance, the team is strong going into 2023. The investment in sustainable workload, interesting projects, and genuine team culture paid off, even if it didn't win every individual negotiation.
86%
team retention rate for 2022, against a NZ tech industry average of approximately 72%
Source: Robert Half NZ Technology Salary Guide, 2022
The Consolidation Bet
At the start of the year, I said we were prioritising consolidation over expansion. Looking back, that was the right call. The systems are cleaner. The documentation is better. The technical debt is lower. None of these things are visible to anyone outside the team, but they make everything else faster.
The integration work we invested in is already paying dividends. Connections that used to break when upstream systems changed are now resilient. New integrations take days instead of weeks. The plumbing is boring but it works.
And Then November
I've written about this already, twice, so I'll keep it brief here. ChatGPT launched on November 30th. I wrote about my first reaction and then a more analytical assessment. Both pieces are honest about the uncertainty.
What I want to say in this year-end review is something slightly different. It's about timing.
We've spent the last five years building capability in enterprise software delivery. Understanding complex systems, managing integrations, building for scale, maintaining quality. That work, the accumulated expertise and patterns and hard-won lessons, feels like it's about to intersect with something new.
I don't know what the intersection looks like. I'm genuinely uncertain. But everything we've built, the technical foundations, the delivery practices, the team, the relationships, feels like it positions us to respond to whatever comes next. We understand enterprise problems deeply. If AI changes how those problems get solved, we're well-placed to be part of that change.
Most years end with a plan. This year ends with a question mark - not an anxious one, a curious one.
Isaac Rolfe
Managing Director
What's Next
Normally I'd lay out priorities for the coming year. This time I'm going to hold off. Not because we don't have a plan, but because the honest version is: we have a plan, and we're watching to see whether the plan needs to change.
The fundamentals are the same. Do excellent work for good clients with a strong team. Everything else is details, and some of those details might look quite different in twelve months.
Thank you to everyone who read these pieces in 2022. The writing helps me think, and the conversations they start are often more valuable than the pieces themselves.
See you in 2023. It's going to be interesting.