Speed is non-negotiable.
An open letter from Sean Reddington on why pace, not feature count, is the real competitive edge – and what changed at Thrive to get there.
.png)
We hear it time and time again…
“No other vendor was as agile as you.”
“We were most impressed by the pace.”
“I’ve never seen an idea actually developed and completed by the end of a meeting.”
I don’t think that’s a small thing.
Speed is becoming one of the biggest competitive advantages in technology.
We’re seeing it with Frontier AI, it’s the next race to the moon.
But it’s not necessarily about speed for the sake of shipping more features.
It’s speed of understanding a problem, to testing an idea, to putting something useful in the hands of our customers.
Over the last year, we’ve completely changed the way we build at Thrive.
We’re shipping 5x faster, moving from idea to production quicker than ever and increasingly being first to market with new innovation.
That matters because the advantage doesn’t just belong to us.
It passes directly to our customers.
For example, when Thrive customers had access to our MCP Server months before others started releasing theirs, they got to experiment earlier, learn earlier and understand what this technology could mean for their business sooner.
That’s what moving quickly as a partner unlocks.
What’s changed?
We challenged a lot of the traditional ways software gets built. Today:
- Engineers work to a 70% minimum AI-generated code benchmark
- We use AI prototyping, putting working prototypes in front of customers rather than spending time on traditional PRDs
- We ship every day, with customer releases every two weeks rather than waiting for quarterly or annual release cycles
- We’ve reduced product headcount while increasing engineering capacity, shortening the distance between research, ideation and working software
- We’ve invested in more full-stack engineers, giving teams greater ownership of their domain
- And we’ve removed conceptual projects. Every effort has to result in tangible customer benefit
The result has been a pretty incredible year.
We’ve launched 170+ new features, won 11 awards and welcomed some of the world’s biggest brands.
Kiki has evolved from an AI assistant into a team of agents capable of handling 100+ tasks, alongside a voice-enabled Coach.
Our AI Content Creator now includes vibe coding and automatically generated podcasts.
We’ve transformed the mobile experience with Chat, Social Spaces and Rewards.
We’ve launched AI-prompted analytics and the Thrive MCP Server.
And we’ve brought Thrive Mentoring and Thrive Hub into the wider Thrive experience.
But the number of features isn’t really the point.
The bigger ambition
We’re building towards what we believe the modern employee experience should become.
One connected place to learn, find answers, build skills, connect with people and get work done.
And we’re nowhere near finished.
Our roadmap is taking us further into adaptive and personalised learning, saving businesses time and money on essential training, evidence-backed skills and talent mobility, frontline tasks and checklists, AI tutoring alongside human mentoring, smarter AI-powered content creation, and much richer in-product communication.
The technology around us is moving faster than it ever has.
And the way we adapt and adopt isn’t to build bigger processes around that change.
It’s upskilling people to move with it.
For us, that means fewer layers between customer problems and engineers and much shorter cycles between having an idea and proving whether it works.
Because it isn’t about being the first. It’s about giving our customers more time with what comes next.
That’s the pace we’ll keep building at.
Sean
Co-CEO, Thrive
