When the company that I worked for in Manchester (2ergo) was bought by Eagle Eye just over a decade ago, there still weren’t that many of us, even in the combined company. Those early days were great though, late nights, lots of pizza, war rooms, even just talking to a big grocer was a massive deal for the business, and innovating to solve those early customer problems was a daily/nightly occurrence. Those days went by in a blur and in many ways nothing has changed since. Eagle Eye is a fast-paced business, with ambitious plans for the future and where no single day is ever the same. We love it.
We like to think our superpower is problem-solving. In the early days, we looked to our customers and prospects to understand their challenges and learned how to solve them, at speed, with quality, and, as time went on, at scale. Every conversation about their struggles and ambitions refined both the way we worked and the way we thought about product build. We saw the lightbulb moments when they used our platform, celebrating with our customers every time one of them went live with a new loyalty or promotional program.
As we grew the platform and feature set, we also had to grow the team and the way in which we worked. Agility became our mantra, to me it’s a mindset not a methodology It builds resilience by helping to expect change and to be able to pivot whilst keeping true to our own internal rule. If we build something in the core platform, it has to be reusable by another customer. Dead catchy, I know. This is key to building a platform where our customers can take advantage of features built in tandem with other similar and different businesses around the globe. We formed sprint pods (we call them SPODs), we built key relationships between product owners and engineers, sweating out solutions together, always pushing for excellence, still solving all the problems that customers came to us with.
The market shifted, and we shifted with it. Our customer base grew across hospitality, grocery, and specialty retail. We invested in Product Management to understand where we should be heading next and to work with our customers, partners, and customer-facing teams more closely. New regions developed, and we were right there, building the tools our customers needed to reach beyond segmentation and into individualisation, combining online to offline.
And here we are, a decade later. Now 50-odd strong in the product build team alone (about the same size as the whole company in 2014), but still with that same problem-solving spirit. We've got the expertise, the platform, and offices all over the world. But what fuels us is still that spark – knowing we're building the tools that solve real problems, empowering businesses to connect with their customers in a way that's genuine, unique, and truly effective.
It hasn't always been easy – blood, sweat, and maybe a few celebratory beers were definitely part of the equation. But when you believe in the power of what you create, the work becomes an exhilarating challenge. Thank you to all those that have shared part or all of the journey in the last decade and before. We're proud of the personalized marketing platform we've built, and we're even more excited to see what the next decade holds.
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