We aim to deliver customized solutions for companies, processes, and goals because this is the only way to achieve competitive advantages.
Businesses face many challenges when deciding how to build custom, bespoke software – we call this the Advantage Gap.
We overcome the Advantage Gap by adhering to four proven principles that ensure our clients achieve maximum business value.
Deep Collaboration, Ownership, and Product Thinking
You know exactly how your business works and want to evolve to maintain or improve your competitive edge. When it comes to IT, there is an abundance of technology decisions, tool choices, and architecture definitions – quite a challenge if creating software isn’t your core business (yet). Even in hybrid teams, a.k.a. squads, deep collaboration has proven our ability to work with customers.
Deep collaboration is essential on multiple layers. On a team level, absolute experts in their domains join forces. This includes your business and tech experts who will work with our technology and engineering professionals. This enables bi-directional knowledge transfer – we can better serve your business needs while allowing your in-house teams to own and maintain your intellectual property and software stack, now and in the long run, even to get your team to the point where they may no longer need us.
Most importantly, we don’t just run a project together – we build a product. While projects have a start and an end date, products come with a lifecycle and clearly defined ownership. Starting from an MVP to one or more iterations, maintenance, upgrades, and support – every critical piece of software that supports your business deserves to be productized and treated accordingly. We assume responsibility and commit to the product’s objectives. We ensure product squads remain knowledgeable and available throughout a multi-year lifecycle.
We don’t staff projects. Together, we create products that have a future.
Deep Technology Expertise
There is abundant technology, tech stacks, operating environments, AI tools, data storage systems, message queues, etc.
There is no one-size-fits-all for specific business requirements. Hence, decisions about the right tech stack matter as they can decide the performance and scalability of the software products we build together. Product specs and sales teams don’t always provide the complete picture; experience is essential to advise and guide decisions.
We spend significant time staying on top of important developments, tech innovation, and state-of-the-art methodology. We collect experience across a wide range and number of software products. We gain and apply our deep technology expertise at scale.
Standard software claims it is “experience at scale.” We unlock bespoke experience at scale.
We’re experts in becoming domain experts.
There are industry experts, strategic advisors, and business consultants – and you are the absolute expert in your domain. We acknowledge that we provide some industry and much more tech expertise. Great things can happen when we join these forces.
During workshops and event storming sessions, but through deep collaboration every day, we become experts in your domain, guide you on the right software way forward, and create powerful software products together.
Agile Methods
Agile has been around for a while for many good reasons. We appreciate the flexibility to focus on what needs to be done next; either we planned accordingly, or it has emerged as such.
Product owners need reliable planning input. We strongly believe agile is the only way to keep product development on track as we continuously focus and re-adjust engineering activities aligned with our objectives, milestones, and emerging issues.
This is an essential component how we assume product responsibility.
Case Study
A tailored enterprise platform for a global retailer
Over the last two decades, CID has built a continuously evolving enterprise platform for global work and utility wear company Engelbert Strauss. We’ve also collaborated closely with them, applying our hybrid approach and SMART FACTORY! Principles to achieve efficient and successful project results.
