Case Studies

How to get ahead of the AI shockwave

The past few years has seen a deluge of agentic development proclaiming to upend everything from protein folding to self-driving cars, and everything in-between, leading to the pretty much everyone demanding their organisation somehow exploit this new magic by shoehorning it into everything from outreach engines to running shoes.

In reality, 95% of these efforts fall by the wayside, busy-work disguised as game changing in an effort to meet the impossible expectations driven by hype rather than need.

But, and there is a but – that 5%. That 5% is where genuine, industry changing value is found. Think chat agents, think material engineering, think medical science – think big data.

It’s that last part where the interests of Red Shift and Sayvr meet, in this, to create a completely new ecosystem designed to link diet, goal setting, cooking skill, inventory management and the unavoidable time-sink of shopping, into single, holistic experience tailed to the individual. If you’d have proposed to harmonise all of these variables into a user experience that actually requires less screen time and manual interaction than attending to all these separately, then you’d behave been right. Until now…

Building an integrated and harmonised AI data layer

Sayvr’s mission was nothing short of gargantuan. Take all of these elements, map them, figure out how to seamlessly unify them, and build it all out at once to meet near-impossible user expectation first time.  Clear direction and definitive clarity were essential.

Luckily, we’re quite good at this here at Red Shift and began by walking the team through our Delivery Governance Framework.

The first cycle was based on Daneil Bond’s, The Head of Engineering, proposed architecture, which allowed us to get several layers deep, form the “What” to the “How” and all the way down to the “when”. Which is when we realised, we’d overshoot our timeline by a factor of 4, which was…sub-optimal.

A whiteboarding session was needed. Cue the founders, Sam and Alex, franticly ideating against a whiteboard, explain the long-term vision and bringing that down to a tangible near-term objective for us to refocus on.   

You don’t need to boil the ocean to make tea…

This led us to completion of the second cycle of this process, which outputted a plan some 6x smaller than the first. Narrowed, refined, focused – now we’re talking.

The result is a shared understanding of exactly what we are doing, how we are going to do it, when it’s getting done and who’s doing it.

At a high level:

We pull the idea out of the founder’s minds and try and write it down. We send this back to them as a formal document which naturally requires iteration.

Once that has landed, the next step is to write down the how. A similar exercise but from an engineering lens abstracting down the high-level concept into Lego blocks of deliverables this is explicitly defined and sent back to the head of engineering for validation.

This allows us to move onto the when. Now that we have those Lego blocks, we can size them as week-sized multiples, one week two weeks etc. You now have a schedule.

This again sent back to ensure a shared understanding of what the Roadhead looks like in detail. Crucially, this phase allows leadership the opportunity to interrogate the proposal rather than simply being told what it is. There is no need to argue over why something might take so long because we now have the detail available for all and because we’ve all been on this journey the complexity and debt is appreciated intuitively.

Show – don’t tell.

And voilà you now have a legitimate delivery schedule. Now you can start to build.

Breakdown. Define. Align. Measure.

This process this exercise and taking a completely novel idea and we’re finding it down to the task level which code can be written against should be the default practice.

In reality, as we all know this is rarely the case.

CEOs dictate, Product Managers failed to challenge, Engineers interpret, and at the end you end up with some horrific mutation, begging to be put out of his misery.

The secret ingredient is leadership. This exercise can only survive leaders CEOs founders who understand their organisations in depth and have the courage to be challenged.

This level of clarity is only possible when leadership not only respects the necessity of friction, but revel in it.

The result is genuinely groundbreaking progress, the kind that wins funding up ends industry norms and establishes brand-new markets.

Who said software development can’t be fun?

Now we can’t say of course with the commercial terms of engagement, but we can say that despite having access to an army of genetic focused start-ups in London a lot within walking distance of the head office it fell to us to firstly identify and finally to deliver the solution of push group needed.

FOUNDER’S PERSPECTIVE - Samuel Day

 
"Working with Red-Shift came at exactly the right moment for us. We were sitting on a huge product vision: a fully integrated ecosystem bridging meal planning, unified scanning, grocery conversion, and automated kitchen inventory, but translating that into an actionable, engineering-ready plan was proving extremely difficult and chaotic.

What Red-Shift delivered was clarity. He took a concept that lived in our heads and, through a structured and sometimes uncomfortable process, distilled it into something we could genuinely build against.

The biggest breakthrough was realising just how far our original roadmap would have overshot. That level of visibility was something we simply didn’t have before this engagement. Red Shift helped us snap the vision into focus, narrow the scope, and rebuild the delivery plan into something achievable without compromising the long-term ambition.

From working sessions with the founders to deep dives with our Head of Engineering, Red-Shift translated ambiguity into concrete Lego-block deliverables - sized, sequenced, validated and pressure-tested. For the first time, everyone at Sayvr had a shared understanding of the “what,” the “how,” and the “when.”

This alignment has meaningfully accelerated our ability to execute. We walked away not just with a delivery schedule, but with a clearer product identity and internal rhythm for how we make decisions. Red Shift didn’t just help us plan the next phase of Sayvr, they sharpened the way we build as a company."