Maintenance Partners Software | Sprint Strategy
Developed by industry leaders, Maintenance Partners is a software custom built by fire safety professionals, for fire safety professionals. They completed a sprint strategy with myself before moving into design and web, a collaborative project with Aimee Alta design. In total, we had 6 weeks to complete the work before Maintenance Partners went live at Fire Conference 2025.
As a new product, Maintenance Partners primary challenge was positioning for launch — coming out the gate as a trusted compliance partner for fire safety software in Australia. But a close second in challenges was the shift in industries for the founders. Maintenance Partners is not just selling fire safety compliance; it is also a full field service management software able to provide all the necessary daily tasks such as inspections, maintenance tasks, and reports for multiple sites. For the founders perspective, they have now shifted from the Fire Safety industry into the wide world of software publishing, an industry with different norms and user expectations.
A big part of my role in this project was managing those expectations and challenging thinking. The process started as always with researching, digging into market data to understand not only what fire safety professional need to be compliant and do the job well, but what are the expectations with a software platform. How do we put compliance at the heart of every touchpoint and still meet all the functional needs of users?
Two key insights that informed the rest of the project was the strong opportunity in this niche space, and the strong user expectations around software in 2025 (e.g., responsiveness, remote-access, OS integrations, customer support).
Armed with this info, I developed a brand strategy guide for the team to support both their launch and their continued R&D. As it is a new brand, I emphasised doing what you can do — the founders have their own businesses and cannot give 100% of their time, so it was crucial to lay a strong foundation that would allow them to grow sustainably and not burn out themselves, their businesses, or their team. This pragmatic approach allows the brand to stay nimble and responisive.
With the direction of the brand set, Aimee Alta came on board to craft the design. The goal was to move away from the traditional language of fire safety — red, orange, blue — and lean more into the visual language of the software industry. For the time being, Maintenance Partners is online as a landing page, but we are looking forward to seeing it grow!