Product strategy
Discovery is not a formality
The phase most often compressed to two weeks is the one that determines whether the following nine months are worth anything.
Read the articleLoading
Independent studio — London & Rotterdam
We turn complicated problems into systems people can use.
Avenor Works is an independent strategy, design and technology studio. We work with established organisations on the parts of their business that are genuinely difficult — operations, service delivery, platforms that have outlived the company that built them.
Position
Independent, and structured to stay that way
We do not resell software, we hold no partner certifications, and we are not owned by a group with a delivery arm to keep busy. When we recommend something, the only thing we gain from it is the work of doing it well.
That independence shapes how we are engaged. Our strategy work is priced so that we can conclude a project should not proceed, and we have done so. It is a smaller business than the alternative, and it is the reason clients come back.
- Founded
- 2016
- People
- 34
- Studios
- London and Rotterdam
- Repeat clients
- Two thirds
Selected work
All workSix engagements, and what actually changed.
01 / 06Halden Maritime
- 01
Halden Maritime
Replacing forty spreadsheets with one operations platform
2025Digital StrategyProduct DesignWeb Platforms
- 02
Brightmoor Trust
A grant application that does not punish small organisations
2024Digital StrategyProduct Design
- 03
Nordvik Energy
Making a wind portfolio legible to the people who finance it
2025Product DesignTechnology Consulting
- 04
Ashcombe & Fell
A replatform that did not interrupt the workshop
2024Web PlatformsDesign Systems
- 05
The Calder Institute
Publishing research that can still be read in twenty years
2023Web PlatformsDesign SystemsDigital Strategy
- 06
Meridian Rail
One design system across nine customer products
2023Design SystemsTechnology ConsultingProduct Design
Approach
Four phases, and an end date.
Every engagement runs the same way, whether it lasts six weeks or nine months. The last phase is the one that matters most: we are finished when your team can run what we built without us.
- 01
Establish
We work out what is actually true. Interviews with the people who use and operate the system, a read of the data, and a look at the work as it is performed rather than as it is documented.
A written position, including the parts nobody wanted to hear.
- 02
Define
We settle what the thing is, who it serves, and what it has to do at launch — and, just as deliberately, what it will not do. Sequencing and cost are attached here, not later.
A defined proposition and a sequenced plan with cost and risk.
- 03
Build
Design and engineering run together in two-week increments, with your team involved throughout. Accessibility, performance and search budgets are enforced in the build rather than assessed after it.
Working software in production, in increments you can stop.
- 04
Hand over
We document the system, train the people who will run it, and stay involved through the first period of independent ownership. The engagement ends when your team no longer needs us, which is the point.
Documentation, training, and a team that owns what we built.
Services
Five things we are engaged to do.
Most engagements combine two or three of them. We would rather do a small number of things properly than list everything we could theoretically take on.
All services- 01
Digital Strategy
Deciding what to build, what to retire, and in what order — before anyone writes code.
- 02
Product Design
Designing the thing people actually use, in enough detail that it can be built.
- 03
Web Platforms
Building and replatforming the public-facing systems an organisation depends on.
- 04
Design Systems
Building the shared component language that keeps a growing product coherent.
- 05
Technology Consulting
Independent advice on architecture, suppliers and the decisions that are expensive to reverse.
In their words
“They talked us out of the thing we asked for and into the thing we needed, in the first three weeks, at their own commercial expense. That is not a common experience with consultancies.”
Insights
All insightsPositions we have argued for often enough to write down.
Design systems
What a design system owes the people who use it
Most design systems are built for the organisation that publishes them. The ones that survive are built for the teams that have to adopt them.
Read the article
Platform modernisation
Replatforming without rewriting the business
The big-bang replatform is still the default proposal, and it is still the reason so many of them are remembered as a bad year.
Read the articleAvenor Works is thirty-four people across London and Rotterdam. We were set up to sit between the people who decide what to build and the people who build it, because that is where most digital work goes wrong.
Next step
Tell us what is not working. We will tell you what we think.
A first conversation is an hour, costs nothing, and usually ends with a straight answer about whether we are the right studio for the problem.