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How Keel built a culture of deep work to match the operational rigor they sell
The London-based ops platform equipped their Workspace.co.uk office with Work With Island booths to protect the focus environment their engineering and product teams demand.
The London-based ops platform equipped their Workspace.co.uk office with Work With Island booths to protect the focus environment their engineering and product teams demand.
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About Keel
Keel builds ops software that adapts to how businesses actually work, not how a vendor thinks they should. Co-founded by Benoit Machefer and Tom Frew, the platform emerged directly from the pain they lived at Echo (now Pharmacy2U), where they scaled operations to 50,000 shipped prescriptions a day and £100M ARR using bespoke internal tooling, because nothing off-the-shelf could keep up.
Keel is the answer to a universal ops problem: the gap between enterprise ERPs (too rigid, too slow, too expensive) and no-code tools (too fragile at scale). Their platform lets ops teams build and change workflows themselves, without engineering tickets, in days, not months.
The Office
Workspace.co.uk : Keel is based in a Workspace flexible office in London, one of the UK's leading providers of premium workspaces for growing businesses, with 60+ locations across the capital.
The challenge
As Keel's team grew within their Workspace.co.uk open-plan floor, the friction became impossible to ignore. Customer discovery calls — which Benoit joins personally, every single one — investor meetings, and the deep engineering sessions that define how Keel ships all suffered from ambient noise.
Moving to a larger office wasn't the answer. The right focus infrastructure was.
The Work With Island solution
Work With Island acoustic booths — 1 solo focus pod and 1 duo unit — installed directly into Keel's Workspace.co.uk floor with no construction work required, live in under two weeks. No landlord approval needed. No disruption to the sprint cycle.
Bonus · Engineer mode
Tom went one step further: smart occupancy lights, built from scratch
Not content with just having the booths, Keel's CPTO Tom Frew wired them up to a custom occupancy indicator system, Google Calendar-synced Philips Hue lights that tell the whole office, at a glance, whether a booth is free, about to be taken, or occupied.
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Lights automatically turn off at night and on weekends, zero manual intervention.
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Whether you go full engineer mode like Tom or prefer the Zapier route, WWI booths are a platform, not just furniture. Keel made them entirely their own.
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Warm white
Booth is free, walk right in
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Orange
The booth is reserved within the next 15 minutes.
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Red
The booth is occupied, do not disturb.
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