Process is a feature
Clients don't hire us for hours. They hire us for outcomes. The operating system below is how we keep both honest.
Align → Sketch → Build → Ship → Compound
- Align (week 0) — one room, one whiteboard, one written brief. We don't start until the success metric and the kill criteria are on the same page.
- Sketch (days 1–5) — clickable prototype with real copy. If it doesn't earn a nod here, more engineering won't save it.
- Build (weeks 2–5) — small PRs, daily deploys to a preview URL, weekly demos that anyone in your org can watch.
- Ship (week 6) — production cutover with feature flags, dashboards, and a rollback plan rehearsed at least once.
- Compound (ongoing) — a monthly review where we cut what isn't pulling weight and double down on what is.
What this is not
It's not Agile theater. It's not a Gantt chart. It's a small set of habits that make the difference between a project that ships and a project that becomes a story you tell at the next vendor's pitch.
Why it works
Because every step has a tangible artifact — a brief, a prototype, a PR, a dashboard, a metric — and every artifact is reviewable by someone who isn't an engineer. That's the whole trick.
