Digital Strategy & Consulting
The most valuable thing we do is tell you what not to build.
Strategy from people who have to live with the answer.
We help you decide where to invest, in what order, and what it’s worth — then we’re accountable for delivering it. Advice from a firm that never builds anything is easy to give. Ours has to survive contact with production, which is a very different discipline.
Sixty minutes. No deck, no diagnosis dressed up as a proposal.
- Diageo
- Aviation Gin
- Casa Famosa
- Taffer's
- InkJet World
The business problem
The hard part was never generating ideas.
Every organisation we meet has a longer list of things to do than budget to do them with. What's usually missing is a defensible way to choose. These are the four conversations we're brought into most often.
Six credible initiatives, funding for two, and no agreed basis for choosing. So the loudest sponsor wins, or the list gets split evenly and nothing lands properly.
"Everything is a priority, so nothing is."
Three suppliers, three scopes, three prices, and no way to compare them — because nobody wrote down what the thing actually needs to achieve.
"We can’t compare these quotes."
It shipped roughly on time, everyone was reasonably pleased, and the number it was meant to change didn’t. Nobody can say precisely why.
"We built it and nothing happened."
Systems accumulated over a decade, subscriptions nobody reviews, and an annual spend that no single person can account for line by line.
"What are we actually paying for?"
Strategy capability
One team from the first question through to continuous improvement.
The people who frame the decision are the people who deliver against it — which is why our recommendations tend to be shorter and more specific than the ones you'll get elsewhere.
What you're running, what it costs, what works and what everyone quietly works around.
What each option is worth in money and when, with the assumptions stated so they can be argued with.
Whether to build, buy, extend or retire — costed over three years rather than at purchase.
The order that delivers value earliest and keeps your options open longest.
What to keep in-house, what to partner on, and what shape the team needs to be.
The numbers that say whether it worked, agreed before anyone starts building.
How the work usually arrives
One decision, or the order of many.
Some clients arrive with a single question that has stalled — build or buy, replatform or fix, which supplier. Others have a list they can't rank. The work is different, and so is the length of it.
One question, properly answered — with the options costed, the assumptions written down, and a recommendation someone is willing to put their name to.
- Build or buy
- Platform selection
- Replatform or improve
- Supplier evaluation
- Second opinion
Every candidate sized for value and effort, sequenced so the early work funds and de-risks what follows, and cut down to what you can genuinely staff.
- Portfolio review
- Three-year roadmap
- Spend assessment
- Delivery capacity
- Board-ready case
We will price ourselves out of work, regularly. A meaningful share of our reviews end with “do less than you planned”, “keep the platform you have”, or “this is a process problem and no software will fix it”. That costs us the larger project every time. It’s also the only reason our advice is worth paying for — a recommendation that always concludes in favour of the recommender isn’t a recommendation.
Choose the one closest to yours. We’ll show you what usually settles it.
Proof · three clients, three scopes
Three digital projects. Three completely different sizes. Because they had three different jobs.
The clearest evidence of strategy isn't a document — it's what got built, and more tellingly what didn't. These three ran at the same firm, with the same team, and look nothing alike. That's the point.
- The question
- Which parts of a print business can sell themselves online, and which will always need a conversation?
- What we built
- A full shop across five categories and dozens of product types, with variable pricing, a self-serve design tool, order tracking and a dedicated section for a distinct student segment.
- The question
- A brand-new drink with no awareness. What does the site actually have to achieve in year one?
- What we built
- Six pages. The product, the flavours, the story, a retailer finder, an email sign-up and a contact route. Fast, visual, built to be found and shared.
- The question
- The product is unusual and award-winning. What convinces someone to try an unfamiliar bourbon?
- What we built
- Origin story, competition awards shown prominently, a recipe collection giving people a reason to buy, a retailer finder and a clear hand-off to the shop.
A firm with one template would have built the same site three times. The scope came out of the business question in each case, not from a menu — and in two of the three, the most valuable decision was something we talked the client out of.
Why Oxytal
Why us and not a management consultancy?
A fair question, and the answer isn't that we're cheaper. Here's the honest version.
We build what we recommend, which means an unrealistic estimate becomes our problem within months. Consultancies that never deliver are never corrected by reality — that feedback loop is the whole difference.
Not from a benchmark database, but because we quoted and delivered similar work last quarter. Business cases built on real recent numbers hold up in front of a finance director; ones built on industry averages usually don't.
Reviews that end in "keep what you have" or "this is a process problem" cost us the bigger project. We do it often enough that it's a stated part of how we work, rather than a claim on a page.
Two commerce practices, three cloud platforms, both build and buy. We have no single product to protect, so the recommendation follows your situation rather than our bench.
You don't get a roadmap and a handshake, then start the supplier search from scratch. The people who wrote the plan can deliver it, or hand it over cleanly to whoever does — including your own team.
The person in your workshop is the person doing the thinking. No pyramid where the experienced partner sells and juniors deliver — across Dublin and Chandigarh, you get the same faces throughout.
What you get
Short documents that get decisions made.
Not a hundred-page report nobody finishes. The test we apply: could a board approve funding from this, and could a delivery team start from it? If either answer is no, it isn't finished.
What you're running, what it costs, where the effort and money actually go today.
Two or three genuine paths with three-year costs, risks and trade-offs stated plainly.
One of them chosen, with the reasoning and the assumptions written down so you can challenge them.
What happens first, what it depends on, and where the natural stopping points are.
The numbers that will show whether it worked, agreed before anyone builds anything.
How we engage
Three ways in. All of them fixed price.
Two to three weeks. We talk to the people doing the work, look at what's running, and come back with a clear picture of where you are and the two or three options worth considering.
Four to six weeks. Options costed over three years, a recommendation with its reasoning, a sequenced plan and the measures to judge it by — in a form your board can approve and a team can start from.
Regular senior time for organisations without a full-time technology leader — architecture calls, supplier reviews, hiring input and a standing second opinion when something significant comes up.
Straight answers
What clients ask first.
Isn't your advice biased, since you also build?
It's the right question and you should ask it directly. Two things make it manageable. First, strategy is priced and delivered as its own piece of work with its own fee, so we're not funding it by winning the build. Second, we make the assumptions explicit — every recommendation states what it depends on, so you can test the logic rather than trust the conclusion. And the honest counterweight: a firm that never delivers has its own bias, towards recommendations that sound impressive and are somebody else's problem to cost. Judge us on whether we've ever told you to spend less.
What do we actually get at the end?
A short document — usually twenty to thirty pages — containing where you are today, two or three costed options, a recommendation with its reasoning, a sequenced plan and the measures to judge it by. Plus a working session where we present it and you argue with it, which is where most of the value is. If it can't get funding approved and can't be handed to a delivery team as a starting point, we haven't finished.
Do we have to use you to deliver it?
No, and we write the output so you don't have to. The plan is specific enough for another supplier or your own team to work from — that's what makes it useful. Some clients take the roadmap and run a competitive process with it, which is a perfectly reasonable outcome and occasionally the one we'd recommend. If the delivery needs skills we don't have, we'll say so.
What if the answer is "do nothing"?
Then that's the answer, and we'll say it in writing with the reasoning. It happens — usually when the real problem is a process or an organisational one that software would only encode. Knowing not to spend six figures is worth considerably more than the fee, and it's the outcome clients remember longest. It's also, bluntly, why they come back.
How do you price it?
Fixed fee, agreed before we start, based on the size of the estate and the number of people we need to talk to. It's credited against delivery if you go on to build with us, which removes the awkwardness of paying twice to get started. If the scope changes materially we'll tell you before doing the work, not after.
Who actually does the work?
Senior people, and the same ones throughout — the person in your first workshop is the person writing the recommendation. We're deliberately not structured as a pyramid where experienced people sell and less experienced people deliver. You'll meet them before anything is agreed.
Related services
Where the plan usually goes next.
Testing the idea with people before building it.
03Software EngineeringBuilding what the plan decided was worth building.
04Cloud & TransformationMoving off what the plan decided to retire.
07AI & Agentic EngineeringWhere automation genuinely pays back.
Start with the decision you keep deferring.
Sixty minutes with the people who’d do the thinking. Bring the business case you can’t finish, the proposals you can’t compare, or the list nobody can rank. We’ll tell you how we’d approach it — and if it’s a twenty-minute answer, you’ll get it on the call.