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Consultancies leave before the work is built. Delivery partners arrive after the decisions are made. Avenor Works was set up to hold both ends of that, which is harder to scale and considerably more useful.
Avenor Works was founded in 2016, on a fairly narrow observation: the interesting problems in most organisations sit in the gap between the people who set strategy and the people who build things, and almost nobody is engaged to work across that gap.
Consultancies arrive with a recommendation and leave before it is built. Delivery partners arrive after the decisions have been made and build what they are given. Both are doing their jobs. Between them sits the question of whether the thing being built is the right thing — and that question tends to be answered by whoever happens to be in the room.
We were set up to be in that room. A strategy engagement here is led by people who have shipped software, and a delivery engagement is led by people who will say when the strategy has stopped making sense. It is not a novel idea. It is simply an uncommon way to be structured, because it is harder to scale than either half on its own.
Ten years on, the studio is thirty-four people across London and Rotterdam. We have deliberately not grown faster than we can staff engagements with people who have done the work before. Most of our projects come from clients we have worked with previously, or from the people who used to work for them.
The most valuable moment in an engagement is usually the one where somebody has to be told that the plan does not hold. Late is expensive; early is only uncomfortable.
We spend the first weeks of most projects sitting with the people who do the job. Almost every good decision we have made came out of something we saw rather than something we were told.
A system your team cannot change without us is a liability we sold you. We document, hand over, and support the first period of ownership as part of the work rather than as an extra.
Technology choices should be interesting only where the problem is genuinely novel. Everywhere else, we choose the option with the largest number of people who already know how to operate it.
Teams are small and senior. The people who scope an engagement are the people who run it — we do not sell a partner and staff a graduate.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Seven of thirty-four. Everyone below is directly involved in client work; none of them is a full-time salesperson, because the studio does not employ one.
Founder and Managing Partner — London
Nadia started Avenor Works in 2016 after eleven years split between a management consultancy and an in-house product team, having concluded that the interesting problems sat in the gap between them. She leads the studio’s strategy engagements and is usually the person who tells a client that the thing they have asked for is not the thing they need.
Partner, Strategy — Rotterdam
Tomas leads discovery work and spends more time in operations rooms and warehouses than in offices. He has a background in industrial engineering, which shows in his insistence that a process be understood as it is actually performed rather than as it is documented.
Partner, Design — London
Priya leads the studio’s design practice. Her work concentrates on complex operational interfaces — scheduling, case management, assessment — where the difficulty is domain complexity rather than visual craft. She chairs the studio’s accessibility review, which every project passes through before release.
Technology Director — London
Callum is responsible for the studio’s technical positions — what we recommend, what we avoid, and why. He came to Avenor from a decade of platform engineering in regulated environments and has a low tolerance for architecture that exists to be interesting.
Design Director — Rotterdam
Marit leads design delivery for the studio’s European clients. She works predominantly on data-heavy products, and is the person most likely to argue that a chart should be a table. She has taught interaction design part-time since 2019.
Principal Engineer — London
Ewan leads the studio’s design system and front-end platform work. He is the reason our components ship with tests for focus order and announcement behaviour rather than a note recommending them.
Client Partner — London
Sofia is responsible for how engagements are shaped and how they run. She spent six years client-side before joining the studio, which is why our proposals tend to be legible to the people who have to approve them.
Strategy, design and engineering. Registered office.
Ferrymead Yard, Studio 412 Ferrymead StreetLondon SE8 3RNUnited KingdomDesign and delivery for our European clients.
Kalverwerf 183011 AB RotterdamNetherlandsAvenor Works is a fictional studio created to demonstrate the HubZero agency blueprint. The people, clients and projects described on this site do not exist. It is published as a reference implementation of the HubZero agency blueprint — a demonstration of how a studio of this kind might present itself, built to the same engineering standard as a live project.
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.