2023 Tech Reviewed:

By Ned Lowe, Co-Founder and CTO

What a year! I believe we’re right in the middle of two epochs:

Before: Developers, Developers, Developers!
After: Builders Without Borders

Product specialists and modern tool-wranglers will drive and build products, with less and less need for technical expertise. How we adapt to these changes and grow as individuals will be the test of whether we’re still employable in 10 years.

But there is still plenty of time left during this transition period — so let’s review 2023!

Clearly generative AI has been the theme for the year. No need to flog that horse. But I was surprised by the speed with which open source models such as LLaMa 2 or Mixtral have been released to the public. Llamafile makes it trivial for anyone to use at home. It seems inevitable that models like these will power the enterprise applications of the future, not OpenAI.

While generating code isn’t perfect, this is the worst it will ever be — it’s only going to get better. Every developer should be experimenting with the tools — Cursor is a sign of what’s to come, and it’s hard to think of a reason not to use tools like this as they get further integrated into the development lifecycle. Especially as they get personalised and learn what type of suggestions you want.

2023 has been a big year for low/no-code platforms. I believe this trend will only continue, and MISSION+ has become an OutSystems partner to reflect this belief, due to the release of the Outsystems Developer Cloud at the turn of the year. Next year will bring us Project Morpheus — a blending of generative AI and low-code, which I am very excited about. Watch this space.

I like to write, but my artistic skills are limited to say the least. I enjoyed playing with image generation through DALL.E-2, but it was not really usable to illustrate my work. Everything changed at the turn of the year with Midjourney, and the recently released Midjourney 6 is insane (and DALL.E-3 is also great for complicated prompts!). Every blog and presentation should be just that little bit more fun now.

Google has been king of knowledge management for decades. ChatGPT did not challenge that, with hallucinations and knowledge cut-offs. Perplexity is the first tool I have come across that shows what the future has in store. I tend to use Perplexity to answer questions now, rather than Google (although I have not changed behaviour when searching for specific links). Who will win this space? We should know by this time next year!

While I do not agree with DHH’s take on moving the cloud back in-house, I think that we can acknowledge that for many workloads AWS and the like are overly complex and expensive. Infrastructure continues to get easier to manage, cheaper, and further abstracted. The rise of ‘next gen hosting’ such as Fly.io, Render or even Cloudflare Workers was inevitable, and should be considered for new applications in 2024.

So in conclusion, I approach 2024 with optimism — we will be using AI assistants to help us build better products, especially when integrated into low-code platforms. We will ship faster, we will get feedback faster, we will reorient faster. I have seen the future, and it works.

2023 Business Reviewed:

By Nick Martin, Co-Founder and CEO

Taking a look at the world from the business side of MISSION+, here are a few additional thoughts as we close 2023 and look to 2024.

In Summary: It Was a Hard Year.

The tech recession that started in late 2022 seeped into 2023. Everyone was asked to do more with less. In a deteriorating job market we sought to keep our designers and developers from 5 countries across the region in work. As part of our adaptation, we leaned on years of experience building fast to market tech products to work with companies that were less impacted by the market changes. This included work with more later stage startups, private equity transformation groups and companies involved in market or geographical expansion that needed someone like us on the ground in Asia.

One word to describe our 2023 was evolution.

Here are some of the changes that we are making for 2024:

1. Putting Fractional CTOs (FCTOs) at the front of what we do

This year we focussed on CTO and Head of Engineering level talent acquisition. And when needed, these FCTOs became the nexus between visionary founders or CEOs, product managers and the various design & development teams.

In 2023, we had a CTO sitting in a different region who just wanted a FCTO for 2 hours a day overseeing a development team in the Asian timezone. We had another CTO augment a blockchain FCTO for 6 months to get a niche build started. We cannot see a future without our FCTOs as they continue ensuring that everything is pointing in the one direction (and if it’s not, we’re proactive in getting it right).

2. Planning more for the future of work

We spent a lot of time bringing talent to projects only as needed and the concept of Rejuvenating & Re-Imagining Organizations resonated. In summary:

The launch of our Generative AI practice next month will be a reflection of how we help companies navigate these principles.

On a personal level, we started MISSION+ 5 years ago as we sought to expand our ability to work with interesting people on interesting problems so as to lead a more interesting life. In 2023, more people work with MISSION+ than ever before. What we didn’t realize is the variety of technical problems we would be working on would require us to spend a lot of time finding the right people, and we’d focus more on the process for strategic product building, being uncomfortably simple and unlocking agility.

3. Thinking deeply about the people we want to work with

A story for another post but this will be where we spend a lot of time in 2024.

But as interest in MISSION+ increases, it is not just about finding the right talent from a resume perspective but also talent that resonates with our ways of working.

When the people we work with

✅ Display empathy;
✅ active listening;
✅ think from first principles;
✅ bring intrinsic motivation from working in a field or area;
✅ maintain courage and ethics; and
✅ are motivated by helping people around them succeed…

…we are generally OK.

We’ll continue defining this as it will form the basis for hiring in new markets including the Middle East and potentially Australia.

4. Building Community

We spent a lot of time building a FinTech community in 2023. As a personal endeavor I even started a morning club (though the reason was so I could get out of bed after our first daughter was born). We do these things because we like it but it also allows us to become the hub for the best people in FinTech, InsurTech and the areas where we spend a lot of time. Slowly but surely, it’s becoming a differentiated competitive moat as a strong community is hard to build and replicate and gives us access to influential and talented people.

5. Why we are excited for the future

Coming back to the technology, we are already seeing:

↗ People launch more MVPs without funding;

↗ MVP speed increasing;

↗ More low code before code;

↗ Higher fidelity for Proof of Concepts; and

↗ Fractionalised teams supporting smaller teams.

From these technology trends, we are also seeing a focus on super niche and measurable impacts to society, which can only be a good thing and we like being a part of it.