What we do
We provide product-focused services that help organisations and teams optimise their potential.
We do this as external advisors, as members of client teams, or as external teams. We help our clients solve specific problems or challenges, deliver initiatives or projects, or help build capabilities and provide long-term support.
Starting well
Discovery & inception
We help organisations and their teams work in better ways, achieve outcomes more easily, and deliver more confidently.
The most successful organisations we’ve worked with, have strong values, culture and ways of working, are aligned with their goals and context, and have management that embodies these principles, and teams that have been fully bought.
We believe that change is best effected by example, and do this as active team members, by pairing, mentoring, coaching, or via facilitation.
Defining great products and services
Product management & business analysis
We support organisations in shaping products and services that customers find valuable, that fit into organisational context and that deliver sustainably against business goals.
We take a value and user-centric approach, covering all relevant offline and online touchpoints and actors, and strive for balance of breadth and depth while always keeping it actionable.
We cover strategic product management, product or service design, day-to-day product ownership, or low-level business analysis.
Making things easier
Facilitation
We help organisations and their teams make better decisions, achieve alignment and shared context, collaborate and co-create.
We believe that facilitation works best when built on empathy, a clear narrative, high degrees of collaboration, and appreciation of culture and context.
We facilitate or co-facilitate workshops or longer initiatives in supporting capacity individual.
Getting better
Coaching & agile transformation
We help organisations and their teams work in better ways, achieve outcomes more easily, and deliver more confidently.
The most successful organisations we’ve worked with, have strong values, culture and ways of working, are aligned with their goals and context, and have management that embodies these principles, and teams that have been fully bought.
We believe that change is best effected by example, and do this as active team members, by pairing, mentoring, coaching, or via facilitation.
Designing beautiful products
Visual design
We provide art- and design-direction, as well as hands-on visual design for your brand, offline and digital media, and applications.
We believe that good visual design is imperative not only for customer-facing but also internal, operational applications and media. Good design supports use, reflects corporate identity, and balances visual aesthetics and technical constraints and feasibility.
Successfully delivering
Delivery management
Doing ‘the right thing’ is only part of the job, ultimately we also need to ‘do it right’, that is, deliver successfully.
We have been most successful when applying lean and agile best practice and systems thinking and when tailoring our approach to culture and context.
We assure successful digital delivery by providing programme or project management, scrum master- or delivery-led-capabilities.
Get in touch
We’d love to hear from you if you want to chat about an opportunity or challenge we might be able to help you with, if you want to work with or for us, or if you fancy chat to exchange thoughts.
Contact us
Thought leadership
It is very important for us to get out of our ‘bubble’ and keep our finger on the pulse. We are active members in our professional communities, but also draw on learnings from other - sometimes seemingly unrelated - areas.
Playbooks
Practical guidance on how to solve day to day ‘problems’.
Lean Inception Toolkit
A toolkit for the planning, design and facilitation of Lean Inceptions. We use this toolkit as starting point whenever we have to run an inception.
Inception playbook
Inceptions are our pattern to set projects up for success. They are a series of collaborative sessions to de-risk delivery and build solid foundations. This playbook explains the theory behind inceptions and provides hands-on advice and templates for those who plan, run and participate in them.
Tools playbook
Over the last decade, the lean / agile community has created a large number of tools and techniques to solve day to day problems such as goal setting, strategy definition, consensus finding, ideation, visualisation, context sharing or prioritisation. This free playbook provides actionable recipes, examples and templates, for 20 industry standard tools we have found most helpful in day to day use.
Product management playbook
This playbook is a primer for product management. It touches on the basic principles and techniques of product management and was written as a starter-for-ten for those new to product management, Shu-level practitioners – if you like -, or experienced practitioners who need inspiration.
It describes the value of product management and gives hands-on advice on how to ‘do’ product management in practice.
It is intended as starting point, that, to be successful, the practitioner will tailor to context, extend horizontally and vertically across the organisation, and ultimately evolve beyond Shu to Ha or even Ri level.
It describes the value of product management and gives hands-on advice on how to ‘do’ product management in practice.
It is intended as starting point, that, to be successful, the practitioner will tailor to context, extend horizontally and vertically across the organisation, and ultimately evolve beyond Shu to Ha or even Ri level.
Compliance by design. A booklet.
Ideas and recommendations on how to shift from the current unsatisfactory approach to compliance to one that enables and enriches product delivery and operation.
Other interesting playbooks
Here are a number of additional playbooks we have co-created or can highly recommend
Blog
We are lucky to stand on the shoulders of giants who have delivered digital products before us, and we continue to learn from the colleagues and clients we work with. Following the tradition of knowledge sharing, we contribute to various blogs by sharing our experiences, failures, thoughts, and excitements. We are always looking for co-authors.
Read blog
Podcast
We co-host the Burn Up podcast where we discuss ‘all things agile’ with the industry’s top talent, to challenge, support, and inspire like-minded practitioners. During these episodes, we may talk about the purely academic and theoretical, or give most practical advice, float ‘heretical’ ideas, or use this as therapy to post-process day to day woes and achievements.
Please get in touch if you are interested in a specific topic or being part of an episode.
Listen to podcast
Conferences
We are proud to be considered regular speakers at conferences such as Lean Agile Scotland, DevOps Days, Experts Talks, Product Tank, or Agile in the City. Not only does this allow us to share our thoughts and experiences, but more importantly it is an opportunity to meet and interact with colleagues. We would be delighted to speak at your conference or your organisation.
Upcoming conferences we've been invited to speak at
Selected previous highlights to view online
We’ve worked in a lot of Industries, amongst other things we have
worked on trading systems, reporting solutions on top of trading systems and payment gateways in the finance sector and for healthcare companies we have been involved in customer-facing websites, delivery pipelines to speed up deployment and automate regulatory concerns, and developed data-driven value propositions.
We have helped retailers optimise their supply chain and sell to their customers on- and offline, and luxury brands to build beautiful digital tools to engage with their customers.
We have supported automotive brands across all stages of the customer lifecycle, and energy companies to represent their brands and transact online.
We have assisted engineering (and many other) companies in adopting continuous delivery and agile ways of working and have aided organisations in the communication & telephony, entertainment and travel & leisure space interact with prospects and customers.
We have also supported the UK government in providing services to their citizens. We have provided our services to agencies and consultancies, and shared our knowledge and experience with the people and organisations we worked with, building internal capabilities, making them even better in what they do and how they do it.
Some of the organisations we have done work for
Beautiful Abstractions works with
We work with and for like-minded organisations so that we can provide a tailored comprehensive service offering and focus on what we excel at.
