Adaptavist

Adaptavist has long been a leader in the technology space, but when they first partnered with Brew Digital in 2016, they were a team of 60 with a marketing department of just one. Their ambition was clear: to become the “biggest and best Atlassian Partner by every reasonable metric.” However, their digital presence at the time was not equipped to support that scale.

Their original website was built on Confluence. While an excellent tool for internal knowledge bases and intranets, it lacked the flexibility, security, and aesthetic polish required for a global, consumer-facing brand. While the elegant Adaptavist glyph and signature orange palette were established, the wider brand identity was sparse. The website was unable to meet the needs of a rapidly expanding organisation that needed to not only sell services but also demonstrate profound domain expertise to a sophisticated technical audience.

Our partnership with Adaptavist has been one of constant evolution. Since 2016, we have worked as a strategic partner to develop a series of solutions that grew alongside the business. We guided them through several platform transitions—moving from the original Confluence site to WordPress, then to Silverstripe, before ultimately developing a bespoke solution using a Headless CMS.

The effectiveness of this partnership was such that in 2017, Brew Digital joined The Adaptavist Group. This allowed us to become even more embedded within their marketing team, enabling us to innovate more rapidly and achieve deeper strategic alignment.

In 2019, we initiated a complete redesign to improve the site’s performance, security, and functionality. We chose a Headless CMS to provide a user-friendly interface with full WYSIWYG capabilities and scheduled batch publishing. By utilizing Next.js, we removed the need for a traditional database, significantly reducing security risks and improving site speed. This infrastructure allows the website to act as a "shop front," connecting visitors to appropriate software marketplaces or funneling service inquiries directly to the sales team.

The revamped website is now a high-performance engine for Adaptavist’s global operations. It serves as the definitive central repository for product documentation, thought leadership, and the wide variety of resources—podcasts, webinars, and whitepapers—that establish Adaptavist as a global authority. This digital "shop front" has been instrumental in supporting the brand’s rapid international expansion, providing the flexibility needed to promote new products and services across multiple surfaces.

Since our partnership began, Adaptavist’s commercial growth has been exponential. The company has scaled from 60 people in the UK to over 1000 globally, expanding their vendor partnerships to include industry leaders such as AWS, Monday.com, GitLab, and Aha! They have successfully achieved their goal of becoming a Platinum Enterprise Solution Partner and have earned prestigious recognition, including being named a Deloitte Fast 50 winner and Atlassian Partner of the Year.

Technical and engagement highlights from the new platform include:

• Increased Engagement: The site attracts 45,000 monthly visitors, with a 56% increase in engagement time per active user and a 27% increase in form submissions.

• Operational Efficiency: The headless CMS empowers 98 employees across the global team to easily update content through an intuitive interface, striking a perfect balance between simplicity and technical flexibility.

Adaptavist faced a growing operational bottleneck with their internal service catalogue. The central repository for over 300 unique service offerings was housed entirely within a complex Google Sheet. While this spreadsheet had served as a functional prototype, it had reached a critical tipping point where it was hindering rather than helping the business.

The system was effectively "single-player," meaning if one user applied a filter to find a specific service, it disrupted the view for every other user in the organisation. This operational friction was compounded by significant business risk; the spreadsheet’s complex logic was maintained by a single power user, creating a "bus factor" where the organisation’s ability to manage core data relied on one individual's availability. Furthermore, the flat structure of the spreadsheet failed to accurately represent the complex relationships between service variants, and the static nature of the document meant critical data was trapped, unable to communicate with other business tools like HubSpot or BambooHR.

Brew Digital was engaged to transform this static document into a scalable, intelligent web application. Rather than acting as a traditional external vendor, we integrated directly with Adaptavist’s internal Platform Engineering team, adopting their preferred tech stack to ensure seamless long-term maintainability. We utilised an “embedded” team model, aligning our development practices with Adaptavist’s internal standards by building in Next.js as TypeScript, backed by a Postgres database. This ensured the final product felt like a native part of their ecosystem, not a third-party add-on.

To solve the usability challenges, we implemented TanStack to build a high-performance front-end table system. This architecture allows users to execute complex searches and filters instantly—viewing only the data they need without affecting their colleagues. We also integrated Clerk for authentication, creating a secure environment with role-based access. This structure empowers general users to create view data freely while restricting editing capabilities to authorised service owners, ensuring data integrity across the organisation.

To maintain momentum and transparency, we structured the delivery around two-week sprints. We kicked off with a dedicated “Sprint Zero”, a crucial phase for aligning our local environments with Adaptavist’s platform tools and resolving early database synchronisation challenges. This cadence allowed us to regularly deploy to a “playground” UAT environment, enabling stakeholders to validate complex filtering logic in real-time and ensuring that the application evolved in lockstep with business needs.

The launch of the new Service Catalogue marks the successful completion of phase one, fundamentally shifting the organisation from a fragile, manual process to a robust digital product. By migrating complex logic from a shared spreadsheet into a secure, documented web application, we have effectively eliminated the operational friction of “single-player” bottlenecks. The platform transforms static rows into a dynamic relational database, ensuring data integrity through role-based permissions and allowing for the sophisticated visualisation of service variants that were previously impossible to to display.

Key outcomes included:

• Eliminated concurrency conflicts for simultaneous users

• Mitigated key person risk via documented code

• Unlocked scalability for complex data structures

• Improved user experience with faster discovery