Understand → Specify → Ship
Most consultancies start building on day one and discover the problem on day ninety. We do it in the opposite order: understand the business, commit to a written specification, then deliver against it.
Understand
Usually 1–2 weeks
A short, intense discovery. We sit with the people who own the problem: engineers, operators, the person who gets paged when it breaks. We map your domain, your constraints, your existing systems, and what failure actually costs you.
What you receive: A written account of the problem as we understand it, the risks we can see, and a recommendation on whether and how to proceed. If the honest recommendation is not to build, that is what you receive.
Specify
Days, not months — scoped during discovery
We write the specification: architecture decisions and their rationale, data contracts, failure modes and how the system behaves in each, and acceptance criteria precise enough to be tested. You review it, challenge it, and sign it.
What you receive: The specification itself, a document you own. Fixed scope, an agreed definition of done, and a build plan you can hold us to.
Ship
Weekly increments; production in weeks, not quarters
Senior-led delivery against the signed specification. Every week you see the system running, not a status deck. Tests, observability and documentation are part of the build, not an appendix to it.
What you receive: A running system in your cloud, the runbooks to operate it, and a clean handover to your team. Zero duct tape.
Week by week
Weeks 1–2
Understand
discovery, risk map
Following days
Specify
specification written, reviewed, signed
Weekly thereafter
Ship
running increments in your cloud
Final week
Handover
runbooks, documentation, clean exit
Timelines vary with scope; the shape does not. Nothing is built before the specification is signed, and nothing ships without its acceptance criteria met.
What we refuse to do
Build without a specification
If we can't write down what done means, we aren't ready to build, and neither is anyone else.
Staff juniors on your system
The people who scope your system are the people who build it. We don't sell seniors and send trainees.
Discovery theatre
Workshops that produce sticky notes instead of decisions. Discovery here is short, technical, and ends in writing.
Read a specification before you commission one.
We publish the template we deliver against: data contracts, failure modes, acceptance criteria and the sign-off block.
Tell us what must not go wrong.
A 30-minute technical conversation: your problem, our questions, no sales deck. If we're not the right fit, we'll tell you who is.
Book a 30 minute call