Lucid Hearing

Situation

Lucid Hearing is one of the largest hearing aid manufacturers in the world — five hundred clinics in the US, more in China and Central America, and a vertically integrated operation covering R&D, manufacturing, and retail. The company had plenty of technology engineers. What it didn’t have was experience moving from physical data centers to an integrated cloud ecosystem.

The vision was clear at the top: stop being a manufacturing company that happens to have data, and become a technology company that understands every customer’s journey — every clinic visit, every app interaction, every device in the field feeding one customer-centric platform. The gap was between that vision and a team that had never built anything like it.

What we did

We started the way we usually do: with questions, not a proposal. What did Lucid have? What were they actually trying to accomplish? What did they need to get started down the right path? That product exploration phase ran a couple of months before any major build began — long enough to confirm the vision was buildable and that we were the right partner to build it.

From there, Ripple Group embedded leadership across the engagement: an advisory CTO, an advisory COO, a VP of Engineering, and a product manager. Each person integrated with Lucid’s internal team and owned day-to-day management of internal and contracted teams — player-coaches, not advisors who visit.

When the roadmap called for execution muscle, we brought our delivery teams to the table: software development, data engineering, and DevOps professionals who built the platform — a microservices architecture on Azure, automated ETL pipelines feeding a central data repository, GraphQL APIs supporting Lucid’s iOS and Android apps, and automated deployment pipelines throughout. The team flexed up when deadlines demanded it and scaled back when they didn’t.

Outcome

Lucid got its customer-centric data platform — and kept it. The core team has been consistent for years, and the platform now positions Lucid for machine learning models that optimize how hearing aids operate in the real world.

“Ripple Group was there to help us get the ball rolling in the right direction so that as we’re building things, we’re actually building the things that matched our vision.”

— Bennett Griffin, EVP of Research & Development, Lucid Hearing