Newfire Roundup #15: Newfire Turns Eight!

Newfire celebrated its eighth birthday with a global team event and appearances at important US and European conferences where we presented the proprietary tools we’ve been developing and a major shift in how we interact with customers. Read all about it in the new edition of the Newfire Roundup.

Newfire Marks Its Eighth Year With a Global Celebration

Since its founding in Boston in 2016, Newfire has welcomed more than a thousand software engineers, data analysts, UX designers, product managers, and senior advisors to our global community of best-in-class experts. Today, Newfire spans more than 20 countries in four global regions: North and Latin America, Europe, and Asia-Pacific. We have advised on technology strategies, built high-performance engineering teams, and delivered entire products for over a hundred clients building software that impacts millions of people daily in industries such as healthcare and fintech.

To thank our team for their past achievements and dedication to continuous improvement, we threw a proper birthday celebration. The festivities included a global Town Hall, social gatherings, and team-building activities. Of course, no birthday party is complete without a gift, so each of our team members worldwide got a special present to mark the occasion.

Will Crawford Talks AI-Enabled Product and Team Building at DHIS East

In a breakout session at the Digital Healthcare Innovation Summit (DHIS) - East, which Newfire supported as a sponsor, Head of Advisory Services and CTO, Will Crawford shared practical advice for AI-enabled product development in digital health, drawing on Newfire’s recent experiences.?

To set up the discussion, Will explained that, rather than forcing quick AI solutions in disconnected places, Newfire advocates for a holistic approach, advising clients to make AI integral to their way of work.

AI has become so foundational for companies developing digital health products that it’s not even part of the enterprise roadmap anymore. AI is in the water now, and organizations need to look at tools and applications across their entire value chain if they want to retain their competitive advantage.?

Pairing theory with example, Will explained that Newfire’s own product teams have tackled the AI revolution by integrating intelligent, trustworthy tools into every segment of their work, from data analysis and meeting summarization to UX/UI design, requirements creation, and product road mapping. That’s on top of our own research into how we can leverage LLMs to increase the productivity of Newfire business analysts, speeding up and de-risking market entry for our clients. Research that has shown very promising results and enabled us to pull AI methodology even deeper into our practice.

But AI isn’t just about tools. Will also shared Newfire’s knowledge about building strong and effective AI teams, arguing for interdisciplinary teams. Instead of embarking on an impossible search to find a “universal AI expert,” companies should concentrate their efforts on quickly and effectively sourcing experts with deep knowledge about different AI segments. Data scientists, engineers, product experts, and other stakeholders have different perspectives and can each contribute work that will make AI-enabled products valuable and safe.?

For Newfire, these team-building strategies have been a key focus area for some time now. We have been making strategic additions to our leadership team, such as bringing on a leading hypergrowth and people management specialist, Sonali Damle, as our Chief People and Transformation Officer. We’ve also been developing AI-powered proprietary tools, particularly our Expert Finder Platform, to help us match project skill and expertise requirements to specific members of our hundreds-strong team.?

Drawing his breakout session to a close, Will explained that we’re investing all of this effort to give our clients a leg up as they race to develop new digital health products that capture the right market opportunities while removing uncertainty and risk for end-users.?

Delivery Vs. Customer Success: Newfire at Croatia’s Largest Developer Event

Speaking of Newfire’s team-building strategy, another key element is maintaining a strong presence in global regions known for their stability, high education standards, and advanced technical expertise, such as Croatia, a prominent developer hub in the EU.

While Will Crawford shared insights with industry colleagues, Newfire General Manager for Europe, Hrvoje Strepa?ki, delivered a talk on balancing employee and client satisfaction for an audience of software engineers at Croatia’s premier developer event, the .debug conference.

This is another area where we’ve made progress by evolving our Delivery Department into a Customer Success Team. This shift enables Newfire to pay closer attention to the needs of our teams and clients and empowers us to fulfill them quickly and effectively.?

On a structural level, the greatest change we implemented was unifying the roles and responsibilities of several stakeholders, each of them managing different aspects of projects—teams, customers, accounts—into a single role: the customer success manager.?

Within Newfire, customer success managers, themselves experienced technical experts, are now responsible for aligning tasks with individual skills and employee professional development plans. For clients, our CSMs maintain frequent touchpoints to propose solutions and provide access to the fullness of Newfire's expertise, ensuring clients consistently exceed their goals. As a customer success organization, we are now active participants in our clients’ success. This transition has revolutionized employee engagement and changed how clients perceive us—from vendors to preferred partners.

Whether you’re a developer looking for an organization that will keep you challenged and growing or a leader in need of a high-trust developmental partner for your project, we invite you to watch Hrvoje’s entire talk to learn how we do customer (and developer) success at Newfire.

With so much experience under our belt and a commitment to keep growing and improving, we’re ready to tackle the most challenging problems in today’s tech. Stay tuned for more Newfire updates and get in touch to join our journey as a Newfire Partner.

?? EXPLORE PARTNERSHIP OPPORTUNITIES