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Are magpies ruining your business?
2 June 2025
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It might seem a little farfetched, but bear with me - it makes sense.
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It’s popular belief that magpies love shiny objects and can’t help themselves from swooping down and grabbing them if they spot them. Much to my disappointment however, this story has been disproved, and they actually hate shiny objects. But, for the purpose of this article, let’s pretend it hasn’t.
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We're all guilty of being attracted to the next new shiny object; whether it's the latest model of iPhone, upgrading your car, or the newest restaurant that you've seen advertised on Instagram. A lot of the time, nothing terrible happens when we crumble and succumb to these temptations.
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The problems begin when you start allowing this to happen within your business. Whether it's trying to crowbar AI into your business, changing your GTM strategy, or releasing new product lines - all can be great things when done well and with the right reasons behind them, but doing them just because somebody else is or they look cutting edge is NOT the right approach.
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An easy target here is AI chatbots: great when done well, more annoying than somebody cutting in front of you at the queue at a supermarket when done badly. Some companies have removed huge numbers of human Customer Service agents to replace them with AI, only to realise they have made a huge mistake and look to reverse what they've done. By this point the damage is done, disgruntled former employees and customers losing faith and going to competitors. Just think about Klarna’s recent backtrack on cutting 700-employees to replace them with AI.
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This kind of misstep highlights a broader principle. A CTO recently shared on LinkedIn that one of their key learnings stepping into the role was: “Try not to make irreversible decisions.” It’s a mindset we feel strongly about at G&F, and one of the reasons we advocate for starting small. Small steps make it easier to test, learn, and pivot, without risking long-term damage.
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If you're building a new product or introducing AI for the first time, it’s a pretty sensible thing to start small and adopt a POC approach – one of our favourite approaches at G&F. It gives you the time to identify business cases, test, feedback and iterate before going with the irreversible decision. It may well be that it doesn’t make sense to take it any further; but thank goodness you know that now and haven’t wasted millions and years of challenges to fix it!
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So, the next time you see the shiny object, feel free to swoop down, but inspect it thoroughly before picking it up and flying off.
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Testimonials
Gathered & Found were able to deliver a great, experienced, culturally right fit for what we were looking for at FreeMarketFX covering a whole range of Service Design, User Experience, Front and Back end Engineers. This enabled us to scale our team capability very quickly, something we would not have been able to do ourselves. The team supplied were heavily motivated and experienced within the Fintech space and have helped deliver some great outcomes. I would definitely recommend the G&F calibration.
Greg Sherwin
CIO & CTO FreeMarketFX
I’ve been partnering with Gathered & Found while working for several companies now and I have systematically been impressed by their responsiveness, flexibility, overall ease to work with, forward thinking and the consistent level of their engineers and consultants. It has been a real pleasure working with them over the last years.
Nicholas Goubert
CPTO, Ocean Technologies Group
Gathered & Found have completely changed how we approach delivering our most critical projects. We usually have to wait 6 weeks for skilled engineers and delivery managers, but with G&F that timeframe has been turned on its head. Not only do they provide incredible consultants that deliver great work, but they find great culture-fits and their team understand exactly what we need for each engagement.
Engineering Director
Global Insurance Firm
As Founders who have never built a mobile app before, Gathered & Found were incredible at taking us through the entire process and making it very understandable from the outset. They supported us with complete app design, user experience and app development, and delivered an incredible product that will completely change our loyalty and rewards capability. Their Engagement team were also brilliant at keeping us updated with all developments and we honestly couldn’t be happier with the final product. We highly recommend them to any F&B or Retail businesses that need a supportive and amazing tech partner.
Tom Stock
Founder, Burger & Beyond
We brought in Gathered & Found for a critical engagement that required highly talented engineers. Our previous consulting partners had done a decent job, but were struggling with the complexity of delivering the initiative at scale in a regulated environment. The G&F squad that we received was extremely high bar and allowed us to keep in-line with our roadmap and ultimately delivered a great piece of work ahead of schedule and under budget. We are very pleased to have them as part of our wider partner team
Investment Bank
CIO
Gathered & Found have consistently exceeded our expectations with regards to delivering talented consultants that genuinely understand our business and mission. Their consultants are very well versed in our way of doing things and hit the ground running straight away. They have enabled us to deliver a number of high priority projects over the past 3 years, largely due to their ability to rapidly deploy great consultants into our teams and projects extremely quickly
Global Insurance Firm
Transformation Director
