From Design to Deploy: How Vev Turned Stakeholder Complexity into a Go-to-Market Advantage

Enterprise software typically faces a challenging paradox: serve multiple stakeholders without becoming overly complex. In a recent episode of Category Visionaries, Vev founder Tine Karlsen revealed how they turned this challenge into their greatest strength.

The Multi-Stakeholder Challenge

Most web development platforms force a choice: either cater to developers with powerful but complex tools, or serve designers with simple but limited solutions. Vev identified a different approach.

“We cater to teams, so we have to get through to both the designer, the developer, and other stakeholders on the team. And that makes the task incredibly complex,” Tine explains. Instead of viewing this complexity as an obstacle, Vev saw it as an opportunity to reimagine the entire workflow.

Building Role-Based Architecture

The key insight came from observing how enterprise teams actually work. Different stakeholders needed different levels of access and control. Instead of forcing everyone into the same interface, Vev created distinct experiences for each role.

“If a designer sets up something in Vev, for example, a template for a blog post, a marketer can access that template without having the right to change design, but only change content,” Tine shares. This approach protected design integrity while enabling rapid content updates.

The Developer Breakthrough

Perhaps the most crucial challenge was winning over development teams. “The biggest tactic that we had to figure out was how would we make Vev acceptable for the IT team as well?” Tine recalls. The solution was to make the platform extensible rather than restrictive.

“The way that we did that is enabling developers to build new react components for the platform. So anything that you can code, you can build within Vev.” This transformed what could have been a limitation into a powerful feature – developers could expand the platform’s capabilities rather than feeling constrained by them.

Proving the Model

The effectiveness of this approach became clear with their first major client, Shipstead, Northern Europe’s largest media house. By carefully balancing the needs of different stakeholders, they achieved dramatic results: “They actually reduced the time to market for these types of sites with over 90% from three weeks down to now being 30 minutes.”

From Complexity to Competitive Advantage

Rather than creating another all-in-one platform that serves everyone poorly, Vev built a system that respects and enhances the natural workflow of enterprise teams. “The unique point with Vev is the workflow behind getting to the end result, because the workflow is faster without compromise,” Tine explains.

This approach has profound implications for enterprise software development. Instead of trying to eliminate complexity, Vev shows how embracing and properly managing it can create superior solutions. By understanding and respecting the distinct needs of each stakeholder group, they’ve created a platform that actually accelerates work rather than just moving bottlenecks around.

For founders building enterprise software, Vev’s experience offers a valuable lesson: sometimes the biggest challenges in your market can become your greatest advantages – if you’re willing to solve them properly rather than simply work around them.