Our Thinking

All Articles

Our expert writers share their latest experiences from the field. From short opinion pieces to in-depth analysis, hear from some of the leading minds and practitioners in digital product.

Capabilities

Most Popular

    Red Badger and Split to host LeadDev Conference After Party

    Are you attending the LeadDev Conference and looking for an opportunity to network and explore innovative solutions to improve your technical leadership skills? Look no further ...

    Rust Foundation Welcomes Red Badger to Champion the Use of Rust in ...

    ​​London, United Kingdom [23rd May 2023] Red Badger, a leading digital product consultancy, is proud to announce it has become the latest member of the Rust Foundation. The Rust ...

    The Future of Money: Red Badger Gears up for Money 20/20

    At Red Badger, we’ve always been at the forefront of digital transformation, creating impactful solutions for some of the most prestigious names in the finance industry. We're ...

    The Journey Towards Sustainable Fashion

    In a rapidly evolving world, the integration of technology and sustainability is reshaping industries. One such industry that is undergoing significant transformation is fashion. ...

    Discussing our Nando's collaboration at BIMA Round Table Event

    I recently had the privilege of being invited to speak at a round table event hosted by BIMA (British Interactive Media Association), where industry leaders gathered to discuss ...

    How a Sustainable Codebase Can Cut Enterprise Costs and Carbon

    At Red Badger, we recently hosted an event that brought together technology leaders from some of the UK's most well-known brands to discuss the role of clean coding in driving ...

    Red Badger Announces Partnership with Contentful

    [LONDON]—[02 May 2023]—Red Badger, The Digital Product transformation consultancy for blue chips, today announced that it has signed a partnership agreement with Contentful, a ...

    The Changing Nature of Consumer Demand: How Sustainability is Shaping ...

    The fashion industry is one of the largest and most dynamic industries in the world, with a global value of over $2.5 trillion. However, it also has a significant environmental ...

    Consumer-Driven Fashion: How Brands are Meeting Customers' ...

    The fashion industry is evolving rapidly, driven in large part by changing consumer expectations. Today's consumers demand transparency, sustainability, and personalisation, and ...

    Blending Sustainability and Profitability: How Brands are Balancing ...

    In recent years, sustainability has become a key concern for fashion brands, driven by changing consumer demand and increasing awareness of the environmental and social impact of ...

    Pioneering Digital Solutions for Social Mobility and Equal Opportunity

    As Red Badger's Commercial Director and Founding Trustee of Mission Beyond, I believe that every organisation is a digital product company, whether they realise it or not. At Red ...

    How businesses can use data to understand their customers better

    Gianfranco shared an interesting analogy to explain his point, drawing a comparison between basketball and the process of creating a digital product. In basketball, the rules ...

    Using payment data to unlock customer insight

    Have you ever wondered how companies like Adyen are changing the game when it comes to payment innovation? As part of the recent “Insights Reinvented: Strategies for Seamless ...

    Event Roundup: Strategies for Seamless Customer Experience

    On Wednesday the 29th March 2023, we were thrilled to have partnered with Adyen, a company that's been pushing the boundaries of payment innovation for years, alongside industry ...

    Why are basketball players tall?

    Guest blog by Gianfranco Cuzziol, CRM and Personalisation Lead, Avon International The evolution of basketball over the past century is a perfect analogy for the evolution of ...

    Red Badger launches CRUX - Headless app development in Rust

    PRESS RELEASE: Announcing Red Badger’s experimental open-source framework for writing native User Interface (UI) applications for Mobile, Web, and Desktop.  (London) 01 March ...

    iOS, Android and Web applications that share a single Rust core

    It was a pleasure to kick off Day 2 of Rust Nation as a speaker alongside some of the Rust community's best experts, contributors, and educators from around the world.

    Red Badger announces launch of new digital customer onboarding ...

    PRESS RELEASE: (London, Manila) 24th February 2023: Red Badger, the Digital Product transformation consultancy for blue chips, announces the launch of a new digital customer ...

    Introducing CRUX

    Most apps need to be built three times – once for iOS (hopefully in Swift), once for Android (hopefully in Kotlin), once for web (hopefully in TypeScript) – with no code reuse, no ...

    10 reasons why you should be exploring autonomous stores

    Disruption in retail is rife, and the past decade has transformed the way that the sector operates with different technologies, consumer habits and customer expectations shaping ...

    Why we love Split

    All companies are digital product companies, whether they know it or not, and need to behave as such in order to keep up with the competition. Organisations need to have the ...

    How to build a culture of experiential learning

    There’s enough agile theory out there. The hard part is making lasting change, particularly at enterprise scale, when you put agile into practice with a given team or ...

    Engineering for ambition with Adyen

    The dramatic evolution of payments has driven customer demand for frictionless journeys across all touchpoints in store and online. The price for getting it wrong is hefty; ...

    Building a Fortnum & Mason e-commerce store in two days

    Why doing it differently produced an innovative minimum viable product and enabled a better supplier selection process for Fortnum & Mason Red Badger believes delivering an ...

    Product strategy as your competitive advantage

    “Strategy is a process, not an event. Organisations make their strategy 24/7” Clayton Christensen Admiral Lord Nelson famously took on a fleet of Franco Spanish ships in 1805. He ...

    How enterprises create great digital products in 100 days

    Traditional enterprises are facing problems on multiple fronts - recession, the war for tech talent, savvy startups eating their lunch, and now the cost of living crisis. It’s on ...

    Flexible work & parenting: Becoming a Badger & a dad in just 6 weeks

    Starting a new job is nerve-wracking. Starting a new job when you’re expecting a baby in six weeks is another level entirely!  That’s the position I found myself in when I joined ...

    Park life! Volunteering in the local community

    In August we spent a day clearing weeds instead of product backlogs. Taking advantage of Red Badger’s volunteering policy, our team carried out some park maintenance in Myatt’s ...

    Subscription is the new loyalty and other takeaways from HOSTECH 2022

    This year’s HOSTECH event brought the effect of the pandemic on the hospitality industry sharply into focus. It rapidly accelerated customer adoption of food delivery – enabled in ...

    Why I am proud to be a Badger

    The time of year is upon us when Pride fever takes over; preparations are underway for the annual parade, and companies dutifully replace logos to include the famous rainbow flag ...

    Meet our Loyalty Panellist: Dave Robinson from Boots

    As part of our debate on the future of loyalty, we interviewed our expert panellists to learn more about their personal experiences and opinions on loyalty. The first piece in the ...

    Meet our Loyalty Panellist: Gianfranco Cuzziol from Natura & Co

    As part of our debate on the future of loyalty, we interviewed our expert panellists to learn more about their personal experiences and opinions on loyalty. We’ve assembled ...

    Meet our Loyalty Panellist: Candice Lott from We Are The Digital Type

    As part of our debate on the future of loyalty, we interviewed our expert panellists to learn more about their personal experiences and opinions on loyalty. The next piece in the ...

    Point-based vs point-less: Time for loyalty to evolve?

    What is the future of loyalty?  Set against the backdrop of a turbulent economy and a cost of living crisis, it’s never been more important to make an emotional connection with ...

    Consumer Duty: how a digital mindset can solve its 6 biggest ...

    In recent years, rapid innovation and disruption within the financial services sector has left the FCA painfully far behind. The result has been high-profile scams and ...

    Delivering a lean digital product in two weeks

    “The most critical metric is how long it takes for an innovative idea to reach a customer. If it takes your company months, how can you compete with an organization that delivers ...

    Writing Envoy filters in Rust with WebAssembly

    Istio recently released version 1.5, and one of the major changes in it is the deprecation of Mixer in favour of WebAssembly Envoy filters. If none of that sentence made sense to ...

    How to use test automation in software development

    To improve any process, you require at least two things - an honest review of the current situation, and a willingness to change. So why do I get the feeling that we're happy with ...

    8 guiding principles for your tech strategy

    How do we make agile technology choices – especially those ones where we have relatively little information to use as input but our decision is likely to have a big impact on what ...

    7 key benefits of automated testing in software development

    Throughout a testers life, we would have asked ourselves the question ‘To automate or not to automate’. Automation means taking your manual tests and automating them using a tool ...

    Fixing climate change with digital product thinking

    This Earth Day, in a 2-part series, we tasked ourselves to find out how digital products and technologies can help fix a complex problem like climate change by accelerating us ...

    Mission thinking: embracing an experimentation mindset

    Uncertainty has had an ever-increasing presence in our complex economic and social systems – and it's reached a new height with the Covid-19 pandemic. As we endure through these ...

    Mean Time to Repair (MTTR): One of your most important metrics

    In an industry that places such emphasis on speed to market, Mean Time To Repair (MTTR) may be the most important metric you’re not paying attention to. MTTR can be defined as the ...

    Learning to fail to deliver digital product success

    I've lost count of the number of times organisations have told me they have a "fail fast, fail often" approach to delivering projects. This isn’t a new idea, but in practice, so ...

    How to use service design for validating ideas

    Running a good business requires more than just selling a high-quality product. Customers now demand excellence in their experiences and are less forgiving to issues. When it ...

    The key advantages of using a monorepo

    You’ve probably heard that Facebook, Twitter, Google, Microsoft, and other tech industry behemoths keep their entire codebase, all services, applications and tools in a single ...

    What is Infrastructure as Code (IaC)?

    Infrastructure as Code (IaC) refers to the definition and management of IT infrastructure (e.g. networks, virtual machines, load balancers, firewalls, etc.) in a declarative ...

    Microplatforms. The best enabler of continuous deployment ever

    Extremely high levels of automation in the area of infrastructure provisioning and container orchestration have recently enabled a capability we are calling microplatforms - ...

    Why Pipeline as Code is adding value

    Having the build and deployment pipeline as code (PaC) builds on the benefits of having Everything as Code (EaC), e.g. immutable version control, audit trails, peer reviews, ...

    Earning brand loyalty with the Kano Model

    “People will forget what you said, people will forget what you did, but people will never forget how you made them feel.' Maya Angelou If you’re calling it out as loyalty, it ...

    Elevate your design thinking with sketch thinking

    As the name implies, this is the perfect companion to Design Thinking. For those who don't know, Design Thinking is a collaboration method that helps a group pool their collective ...

    4 key takeaways from Kanban Management Professional training

    After recently attending Kanban Management Professional I and II training, I got some useful new language to help me explain some of the underlying instincts that I have around ...

    One minute reads: forecasting with Little’s Law

    John Little coined his eponymous theorem while studying queues – it links the rate at which customers enter a queue, the average wait each customer experiences, and the number of ...

    Introducing an Agile Delivery Framework to the public sector

    Medicines and Healthcare products Regulatory Agency (MHRA) approached Red Badger to create a bespoke Agile Delivery Framework in line with the Government Digital Service ...

    Meet our Loyalty Panellist: Robert Bates from Currys

    As part of our debate on the future of loyalty, we interviewed our expert panellists to learn more about their personal experiences and opinions on loyalty.   The second piece in ...

    Subscription is the new loyalty and other takeaways from HOSTECH 2022

    This year’s HOSTECH event brought the effect of the pandemic on the hospitality industry sharply into focus. It rapidly accelerated customer adoption of food delivery – enabled in ...

    Be a force multiplier

    Have you got what it takes to build products from the outside-in? We’ve recently embarked on a new mission at Red Badger: to build the next generation of digital product ...

    Transforming blue chips into next generation Digital Product companies

    The vast majority of organisations still maintain “traditional” structures, failing to grasp they are already Digital Product companies, just highly inefficient ones. Most are not ...

    How service design is helping Anthony Nolan to simplify ...

    This blog was co-authored by Jessica Morgan, Senior Product Designer, Red Badger A stem cell transplant is one of the most time-sensitive and high-accuracy processes there is. ...

    A truly resilient multi-cloud platform with wasmCloud and WebAssembly

    Myself and senior software engineer Aayush Attri were invited to speak at the CNCF's Kubecon North America event at the end of last year on Wasm day.  In the presentation, we ...

    LGBTQ+ History month: Championing our favourite tech heroes

    LGBTQ+ History Month, founded in 1994, is an entire month (every February) completely dedicated to understanding and appreciating the rich history of the LGBTQ+ community.  As ...

    Secure your business: how to protect yourself from the next Log4j

    With many applications depending on open-source software, how do we protect ourselves against the unknown vulnerabilities that undoubtedly exist? What measures can we put in place ...

    Slay corporate risk, innovate faster

    If there’s one thing ‘digital’ the last couple of years have highlighted to everyone, it is the ability to move ideas into production quickly. We’ve seen an explosion of lean ...

    7 steps to perfect retrospectives to align teams on shared values

    Spend enough time working together in a team and you’re bound to encounter teammates feeling anxious, uninspired or just that general sense of something not being right at work. ...

    A product transformation mindset to tackle social inequality

    This is the second article in a 3-part series documenting how Red Badger built a mission-oriented product company from the ground up. If you haven't already, make sure you read ...

    How Gen Z think about loyalty and why you need to align your strategy

    “Hyper-aware, hyper-connected and hyper-individual, Generation Z are challenging brands in search of a more equitable value exchange.” Chris Sanderson, Co-Founder, The Future ...

    Building a digital product organisation to tackle social inequality

    Cognitive and demographic diversity are key to improving collective intelligence, enhancing productivity, powering innovation, fuelling new ideas and creating more profitable and ...

    Pride 2021 & the Red Badger Social Value Taskforce

    Every year, June is dedicated to celebrating the LGBTQ+ community. It manifests in a broad swath of events, parties, celebrations, marches, speeches and everything in between. No ...

    WebAssembly: The days of cloud vendor lock-in are over

    The use of WebAssembly server-side is driving a major revolution in platform design, moving beyond the cloud as a destination. Coupled with products like wasmCloud and NATS, ...

    Align and integrate: how to cultivate loyal guests

    The hospitality sector has been a rich hunting ground for digital disruptors. For those prepared to do things differently or go above and beyond expectations, there has been a  ...

    Standing out from the crowd: creating memorable customer experiences ...

    Catch episode four of the Adyen Retail Reawakened Podcast on the website. Retailers took a big hit from COVID-19. Those unable to respond in real-time and without a solid digital ...

    How hotels can own their guest experience

    Off-the-shelf digital software or products are great for solving a particular problem, but they often aren’t fit for purpose when it comes to delivering seamless experiences for ...

    The key to overcoming poor guest experience in Hospitality

    Guest engagement and satisfaction will be the benchmarks upon which your hotel will either thrive or fail. If your strategy isn’t focused around these key metrics then you’re ...

    How to build loyalty programmes retail customers actually want

    Colin Neil, Adyen’s SVP of Business Development spoke to me recently for Adyen’s latest podcast series, Retail Reawakened. On the show, we discussed the future of retail and spoke ...

    Start small but think big: how to build a digital roadmap

    Years of tactical technology investment have meant many hotels and hospitality organisations are now built on piecemeal platforms, outsourced services, stand-alone solutions or ...

    How to measure psychological safety

    Co-authored with Jamie Irving; originally published here.  We can probably all agree that, as we are likely to spend more time with our colleagues than our friends and family, ...

    New product development in a brave new world

    Now is the time we should be taking stock, reflecting on what customers really care about, identifying opportunities, and creating new products that will help businesses rapidly ...

    Desirability testing: Innovation at the British Heart Foundation

    How would you define innovation in a business context? For some, it’s about incremental change – your products and services getting better with each new iteration. For others, ...

    Understanding burnout and anxiety - Lunch & Learn by Spill

    A couple of weeks ago I had the pleasure of attending a Lunch and Learn about Anxiety and Burnout. It was led by Will, a member of the team at Spill - a workplace mental health ...

    Can API Products help grow your customer base?

      It’s the playbook of tight vertical integration – famously catapulting Apple to the top of the stock market time and again. The thinking goes like this: the more of the stack ...

    How Gen Z think about loyalty and why you need to align your strategy

    “Hyper-aware, hyper-connected and hyper-individual, Generation Z are challenging brands in search of a more equitable value exchange.” Chris Sanderson, Co-Founder, The Future ...

    How to launch a scalable optimisation programme for digital products

    Picture this. You’ve spent months toiling away, building a fantastic new product. You’ve identified your users, you have your value proposition nailed, you’ve conducted extensive ...

    How product thinking can help solve society’s grand challenges

    The grand challenges set out in the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals aim to solve some of the world's most complex problems. Through our initiative Mission Beyond, Red Badger ...

    6 ways to build an unproductive product team

    An unproductive team can be the result of multiple factors, some of which from habits we may not even realise. Not only does building a productive team get the work done, it has ...

    Teaching people with special needs how to code

    Last year, between September and November, I had the amazing opportunity to teach code to people with special needs. This experience transformed my perspective on how I bring ...

    Designing for complexity: Delivery Framework for the Government

    As part of our work with the Medicines and Healthcare products Regulatory Agency (MHRA), Red Badger was asked to develop a Delivery Framework. Our recommendation was a bespoke ...

    Introducing the remote North Star Framework

    What is it? The North Star framework is a vital tool in aligning Product Teams around a shared sense of direction that guides the way to building products that have an impact on ...

    Successfully introducing User Experience Design (UXD) from scratch

    So you have just landed on a project, and you are tasked with introducing the client to User Experience Design (UXD) and building a design system from scratch, you have autonomy ...

    UX Design: Getting user feedback into the backlog

    As UX designers we are always aiming to balance the needs of the user with the requirements of the business and with what’s technologically feasible. A key element of this is ...

    Mission Beyond Q&A with Matthew Syed on cognitive diversity

    Following the Mission Beyond launch event in June, we had some brilliant questions posed by the audience that we didn't get a chance to discuss. Luckily, Matthew Syed, the author ...

    Validating product ideas using the RAT

    Time, money and resources as we all know are finite. Bummer eh? So when it comes to validating product opportunities, how do we decide which ones are ripe for success and which ...

    Lift off! The launch of Mission Beyond

    We've launched Mission Beyond - a social initiative to bring together business leaders and other actors with brilliant minds and a sense of purpose to contribute to society and ...

    Strategy for developing digital products

    The last 18 months have drastically changed the way I think about developing digital products. My background is in technology. I started as a software engineer working with a ...

    Putting purpose at the heart of business

    Cain Ullah, CEO of Red Badger, in an interview with Manny Amadi, CEO of C&E Advisory. Manny is a trusted advisor to some of the world's foremost companies, non-governmental ...

    Building post pandemic foundations

    We are in the midst of an unprecedented time when the whole world feels that it has stopped and hit the reset button. Sat in our makeshift offices, with life careering in and out ...

    How diversity and recombination drive innovation

    COVID-19 has impacted our world in unprecedented ways. Moving away from the tragedy and fear, one positive impact has been that of our environment being able to take a breath of ...

    Fail small to win big with your digital products

    I am sure that everyone who is reading this blog has worked hard and had some failures along the way, for all of us those mistakes became learning experiences. So we were able to ...

    One minute reads: a North Star in product delivery

    At Red Badger, our delivery teams often use a North Star metric to guide the way through product delivery. A good North Star tells you if the direction of travel your product ...

    Software Development: The Science of Estimating

    Estimating software development is hard, but that's no reason to ignore it. What can we learn from the scientific method and how can we apply it to our projects? Estimating how ...

    Supporting disabled people into employment

    We’re excited to announce that we’re now a Disability Confident Committed employer. Accessibility and inclusion are really important to us, and in the future, we want to be sure ...

    Are you looking to build a digital capability?