In early 2024, I likened our platform and Tech Strategy at The Collecting Group to a Singer 911.
It made sense at the time: take a solid base (the Porsche 964), iterate on it with care and craft, and transform it into something beautiful, powerful, exclusive, and meticulously engineered. Something rare. A halo product. A Singer.
The analogy was good, until it wasn’t.
Rethinking the Analogy
With the completion of our User Merge, we reached a strategic inflection point. And I realised: our journey isn’t like building a Singer. It’s more like engineering a SpaceX Raptor Rocket Engine.
Love or loathe Elon Musk, what SpaceX has done is impressive. The Raptor rocket engine is a constant work-in-progress. Each version is more powerful, more scalable, more efficient. More engineered for evolution. That’s what we’re building.
Where a Singer is the final form, the Raptor is never done.
Singer 911 Analogy
- Strategy Type: Artisan, premium refinement
- End State: Complete, polished
- Strength: Precision, beauty, exclusivity
- Release Mentality: Rare, milestone-based
- Org Focus: Perfection at one scale
- Product Lifecycle: Fixed roadmap
Raptor Engine Analogy
- Strategy Type: Iterative, engineered for evolution
- End State: Never done, constantly improving
- Strength: Scale, efficiency, adaptability
- Release Mentality: Fast, frequent iteration
- Org Focus: Flexibility across many use cases
- Product Lifecycle: Experimental, future-facing, never final
The User Merge was our Raptor 2 moment, quietly transformative:
- We moved from 4% of users registered on both platforms to 100% unified
- One Collecting account now works across all current and future verticals
- Performance and DevEx improved
- Complexity reduced
- Tech debt paid down
- And it unlocked what’s next
Raptor 3?
Where Raptor 2 unified our users, Raptor 3 unifies our platform.
Next we aim to:
- Merge our backends and services
- Simplify deployments
- Increase scalability
- Enable further globalisation
- Support low-code / no-code vertical launches
It sets the foundations for scale, without adding weight.
Tech Strategy Is an Ongoing Engine Test
Tech evolves, it’s never static. New tools arrive, frameworks improve, the business pivots, and customer expectations change. A good Strategy adapts and positions us to take advantage of this.
I created our current tech strategy to support this kind of adaptability:
- Set the direction
- Gain stakeholder buy-in
- Enable the team to execute
- Remove blockers
- Keep outcomes aligned to business value
It’s about leading the engineering vision while making sure the wider business understands the why, feels involved in the how, and benefits from the results.
Retiring the Singer
The Singer 911 is still a thing of beauty. But it’s final. Fixed. A masterpiece built to be complete.
“Everything is important.” – Rob Dickinson, Singer Founder
Our platform isn’t done. It’s not meant to be.
We’re building something that can evolve, iterate, and scale. An engine we can keep refining to go further, faster, and more efficiently.
And that’s the real power of the Raptor analogy.
It’s not a story about perfection.
It’s a story about progress.
“The engine that can be made fastest, with the fewest parts, will win.” – Elon Musk, 2019
Olly Brand 