About Cint

Cint is the technology backbone of the world’s most successful insights companies.

Cint’s platform accelerates the efficiency of gathering survey data, so companies can find insights faster, in a cost-effective and scalable way to power market research innovations and help build better products and services.

More than 2,000 researchers, agencies and brands – including Zappi, GfK and SurveyMonkey – use Cint to transform how they gather insights and be competitive in the market.

Cint has a rapidly growing team across 15 global offices including London, New York, Stockholm, Los Angeles, Atlanta, Barcelona, Tokyo and Sydney. www.cint.com

Our engagement

We were contacted by Cint and asked to work with their technology and leadership teams to assess and help develop their technology strategy.

Cint was already the market leader and had delivered impressive growth. Now, new major client wins were set to fuel plans for more rapid growth, creation of new services and development of new market segments.

“We wanted to bring in external expertise to help us validate and develop the plans we had set for our future technology strategy. Apart from getting the right consulting advice, it was also essential for us to get someone who complemented our company culture. I had experience of working with Solstra previously; so, I knew Stuart’s approach and style of working would be the right fit for us. Solstra played a very important role in shaping the future of Cint’s technology strategy. Eighteen months on, we can see the many positive outcomes that were delivered by the Cint team from work facilitated by Solstra” – Tom Buehlmann, CEO, Cint AB.

It was striking immediately that the technology function was already delivering at a high level relative to many organisations. The team was using leading edge Agile and DevOps practices, and had quickly embraced a modern platform and applications. This would be not about fixing problems as facilitating the future.

Our approach focused on teasing out a clear view of current state by helping the team explore and express this. We then worked with Cint to check and develop the technology strategy. How would the teams and platform adapt and scale for new opportunities and challenges? How would they do this without endangering what had made them so successful to date?

We strive to bring experience from other work in order to challenge and encourage new lines of thinking. Here, we used this to help Cint put things into context. The team had a strong culture of self-analysis and improvement. Sometimes this lacked a perspective on where they were already strong and where there might be gaps. Key throughout was ensuring that any programme of change was being driven by the team.

Our initial review was conducted in three weeks. Specific recommendations covered how the technology function should be organised and resourced, potential improvements to methods, architecture. We provided a recommended sequence of change activity.

We have continued to provide point input and support along the journey. Most recently we worked with Cint to provide a different perspective on their industry leading efforts in information security and data privacy compliance.

Categories: Case study