Before anything is signed
The first call is with the engineers who would do the work. We ask what the system has to do, what it runs on today, who has to approve it, and what the date is driven by. Thirty to forty-five minutes.
You leave that call with one of two things: a written scope and a price, or a straight answer that we are the wrong team for it. Both arrive faster than a proposal you have to chase.
- We sign your NDA before you describe anything confidential
- Referees from our founders' earlier engagements are available before you sign, not after
- If your procurement needs a document we do not yet have, you hear that on this call rather than in week three
Scoping: what is actually in the document
Scoping produces a document, and the document is the engagement. Anything agreed in a call that matters ends up in it.
- Deliverables, itemised, each with acceptance criteria that can be tested rather than argued about
- Milestones with dates, and what is demonstrable at each one
- Decision rights — who on each side can approve a change, and who cannot
- The change process, priced, so a change costs a number you approve rather than a negotiation
- The de-scope order — what comes out first if a cycle runs short, agreed now while nobody is under pressure
- What you must have in place before the first cycle: accounts, environments, and who administers access for our people
The acceptance criteria do more work than anything else here. They are the tie-break for the whole engagement: inside them is ours, outside them is a change.
The two-week cycle
Every shape of engagement runs the same cadence.
- Day one — a planning session against your priorities. Ninety minutes, and it is the only meeting where you have to make decisions.
- Days two to nine — we build. Every change is checked automatically before a person reviews it, and a named engineer reads and signs off each one.
- Day ten — a demo of working software. Not a slide, not a status report, not a percentage complete.
Between those two points your attention is free. There is no separate reporting layer, because the demo is the report.
- You can reorder the backlog between cycles at no cost
- On cycle-based engagements you can stop at any boundary
- Security review happens inside the cycle rather than as a gate before launch — see compliance and AI governance for what that consists of
What we need from you
Less than most suppliers, and it is worth being precise about how much.
- One decision-maker reachable at the cycle boundary. Not full time, but real: a shape that waits a week for an answer costs you the week.
- Access to the accounts and environments the work touches, issued per person and revoked at handover.
- Review capacity, but only on some shapes. If our engineers work inside your team, your team has to review their changes; if we deliver end to end, it does not.
Which of these applies depends on the shape you buy. The three ways to work with us sets that out row by row.
When something slips
It sometimes will. What matters is when you find out and what it costs you.
- You hear that a date is at risk within one business day of us knowing it, not at the milestone
- What falls out of a late cycle was decided at scoping, in the de-scope order, rather than argued over under pressure
- We absorb a cycle we fail to deliver. On a fixed-price Statement of Work the equivalent remedy is named in the contract before you sign
- A defect measured against the agreed acceptance criteria is ours to fix at our cost
Handover, and what comes after
There is no handover event, because there is nothing waiting to be handed over.
- Code, infrastructure and documentation sit in your accounts from the first day, well before final payment
- Architecture decisions are written down where the code cannot explain itself
- Your own engineers can review our changes from the first cycle, so the system is familiar before we leave
- Leaving takes a notice period rather than a migration project
If you want us to stay, ongoing work runs on a monthly retainer you can end at any point. If you would rather take it in house, everything is already yours.
What this costs you in time
The honest total, per two-week cycle:
- One planning session, about ninety minutes
- One demo, about forty-five minutes
- A handful of decisions in between, answered within a day
That is the whole ask. Anything more than that and we are managing you rather than delivering for you.