60% faster delivery: how Morae built an AI-ready engineering team
Morae is a global legal technology and managed services company, working across five continents. When Chief Product Officer Peter Fisher joined, there wasn't really a product engineering function to speak of, just a couple of engineering teams working in their own separate bubbles. Open Works helped build one from the ground up, then helped it adopt agentic AI in a way that's genuinely sped things up.
At a glance
Sector
Legal technology and managed services
Services
- Technology strategy & operating model design
- Applied AI enablement
- Ways of working & change support
- From strategy to delivery
Engagement
Ongoing, 12+ months
Outcome
60% faster delivery within two quarters, a consistent six-week release cadence across every team, and a brand new product taken from a standing start to first customers within a year.
The Challenge
Morae's clients need speed, consistency and defensibility, that's the whole game in legal services. But when Peter Fisher joined as Chief Product Officer, two engineering teams were working in complete isolation from each other. No shared strategy, barely any communication, nobody quite sure what anyone else was building.
Peter needed a proper engineering organisation, and needed it fast. Hiring and growing a team gradually wasn't going to cut it.
How we worked
Open Works, led by founder Wayne Palmer, was brought in to speed that up. The team pulled Morae's engineers together around shared structures, shared processes, and a way of working people could actually stick to, rather than another set of rules nobody follows.
After a few months, agentic AI tooling changed the game. Open Works helped Morae identify where the technology could genuinely add value, then built confidence in using it through hands-on hackathons in Cape Town and workshops in Bangalore. That mattered more than usual here: Morae works with highly regulated clients, so the rigour and quality control had to be real, not just for show.
From there, Open Works led the incubation of a brand new AI solution, taking it from a standing start to first customers within a year.
Growing this fast brings its own friction, especially as new senior hires arrive with their own ideas about how things should run. Throughout, the approach stayed the same: bring people along, don't dictate from above.
What We Did
Technology strategy & operating model design
Built Morae's product engineering organisation from scratch, giving previously siloed teams a shared way of working.
Applied AI enablement
Led the evaluation and rollout of agentic AI tools, running hands-on hackathons and workshops in Cape Town and Bangalore to build real trust in the new way of working.
Ways of working & change support
Got every team onto the same sprint and release cadence, so cross-team communication stopped being a constant struggle.
From strategy to delivery
Led the incubation of a brand new AI solution, concept to first customers, in under a year.
The Impact
So what did that actually mean for the business?
Morae hit its product goals for the year, and did it faster than planned. In Peter's words, that pace has made the business more ambitious, it's raised the bar for what leadership expects delivery to do next.
The acceleration through the adoption of AI development tools in a structured, professional manner, that's the key. Using that best practice and applying it with those tools has let us accelerate what we're doing and how we deliver value for the business.
Peter Fisher, Chief Product Officer, Morae
If something here sounds familiar, it is probably worth a conversation.
Every organisation is different. The challenge is usually the same: ways of working that actually support delivery, growth and change. If that's you, let's talk.