Initial Assessment: When I joined the company as a Full Stack Developer, it quickly became clear that the problem they described in the interview was not the real issue. They had already spent around £100k with an external software agency, but the agency had stopped delivering any meaningful work. Their GitHub repository hadn’t been updated in nearly a year, and yet the previous developer was still billing them £600 per day. They hired me because they needed someone in-house to “fix the mess,” and the urgency in their tone told me exactly what I was walking into.
Planning & Analysis: My first step was to understand the product and the people using it. The system itself—ReactJS, Laravel PHP, hosted on GCP—was functional, but the codebase had no documentation or comments. This meant I had to reverse-engineer how everything worked. More importantly, internal teams were unhappy with the system because it didn’t reflect their real operational needs. I immediately scheduled structured interviews with all user groups, created detailed meeting minutes, and translated their frustrations into a clear list of actionable priorities. I then aligned these findings with the director’s goals to uncover what the business truly needed.
Strategic Decision: I recommended a phased product roadmap. The director wanted the team to completely rebuild workflows and add a long list of features immediately. I advised strongly against this. Their staff were agency workers in a transport environment—rapid change would create confusion and operational breakdown. I recommended stabilising the existing system, releasing a controlled MVP with the highest-impact fixes, and only then layering additional features. For example, the director wanted workers to have the ability to delete their timesheets. I pushed back because this posed compliance and dispute risks; instead, I suggested giving admins controlled access. This was about protecting the business, not slowing it down.
Execution & Oversight: I began implementing the prioritised roadmap while identifying structural issues: missing documentation, no version control discipline, unclear ownership, and zero development transparency. I prepared a formal list of technical questions for the previous developer to understand the unresolved parts of the system. This highlighted the lack of accountability and proper handover by the previous agency. Shortly after sending these questions, the director called me and made me redundant.
Outcome: A few months later, the company abandoned the entire software platform. The failure wasn’t due to the technology—it was due to a lack of proper product leadership, no phased rollout, and no willingness to adopt user-centred validation. They tried to rebuild everything at once, ignored the importance of an MVP, and never gave their teams time to adapt. Their £100k investment ultimately went nowhere.
A scalable digital product doesn’t come from building everything at once. It comes from sequencing, validation, user alignment, and disciplined roadmap execution.
If your organisation needs clarity, a phased product strategy, or help recovering a failing software project, feel free to book a consultation.