About Us
An engineering studio with a long memory.
POWER PLAY was founded by a small group of engineers who wanted to build software the way they'd always argued it should be built: in small teams, with senior people, owning the outcome end to end.
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Our story
From four engineers to a studio of 180.
POWER PLAY started in 2013 around a kitchen table and a single contract: a real-time inventory system for a logistics company that had outgrown its spreadsheets. Twelve years later, the same client still runs on a platform we maintain — and we've shipped systems for organisations across forty industries.
We grew slowly on purpose. Every hire is senior, every project is staffed by people who would otherwise be founding their own companies, and every decision still goes through the same instinct that guided the first contract: build the thing that will be running in ten years.
Mission
Help ambitious teams turn complex technology into operational advantage.
Vision
A world where software is engineered with the same care as bridges and aircraft.
Promise
What we build, we run. What we ship, we sign our names to.
Our values
Seven principles we actually use.
Senior craft
We hire experienced engineers and give them room to think.
Quiet rigour
Documents over demos, instrumentation over opinions.
Long horizons
We optimise for the system that will be live in five years.
No theater
No status decks, no vanity dashboards, no fake agile.
Honest scope
We say no when a project doesn't need what we'd want to build.
Shared ownership
The team that designs the system is the team that runs it.
Open practice
We publish, teach and contribute back to the tools we use.
Team culture
Written, async, and unafraid of disagreement.
Most of our work happens in long-form documents. Proposals, design notes, post-mortems and reviews all live in writing — so anyone, anywhere, on any team, can follow how a decision was made and challenge it on its merits. It is slower in the moment and dramatically faster over a year.
How we work
Small squads, full ownership, real telemetry.
- · Cross-functional squads of 4–7, formed around outcomes rather than departments.
- · Fortnightly visible releases with instrumented success metrics.
- · No handoffs between design, engineering and operations.
- · Direct contact with the people doing the work, every week.
