Intuitix

Intuitix came out of the Alacrity Foundation venture programme and incorporated in June 2020. The founding team was two developers, a commercial lead and me. Product and design were mine from the start, because there was nobody else to do it.

The product tracked innovation portfolios for regulated utilities. Every project sat on one board. The reporting templates were versioned, so a change of reporting framework each year did not cost the project history, and a formula language turned portfolio data into the returns calculations the regulator asks for.

Product and design were both mine. I ran discovery interviews with the first utility's innovation team, built the prototypes from what came out of them, and then ran two structured rounds of scripted user testing, each round pinned to a product version.

I set the feature scope, wrote the product spec, the roles and permissions model and the full user manual, formula language included. I specced features directly with clients and ran their onboarding. On top of that I ran the delivery board, the stand ups, the retros and the resourcing, because there was nobody else to run them.

The first version was built with Wales & West Utilities, who helped define it. South West Water became a paying customer on a monthly contract, after a trial I planned as a sequence of work packages running from process mapping through to a written report.

I ran the onboarding, which is where I learned how a regulated utility actually buys software. It moves one approval stage at a time, and nothing happens at all until the security questions have been answered. The MVP was confirmed in September 2021 and the first version went out as an early access release in February 2022.

The product did what the people using it needed, but it never reached commercial scale. The company pivoted after I left and dissolved in 2024. The organisations we sold into already ran on SAP and Microsoft, and displacing an incumbent inside a regulated utility is brutally hard whether or not your product is better.

Three years took the product from nothing to three named utilities and a paying contract. It's also where I learned the job itself, from running discovery and writing specs a team can build from. I've used all of it since.