A practice document, drawn from how engagements actually run.
The work is the same shape almost every time. Different industry, different team, different software — but the movement from map to build to harden to leave holds. What follows is the long version of that movement, with the parts most consultancies skip written back in.
Get on the floor before the slide deck.
We spend a week or two with the team that owns the work, watching it actually happen. Not interviewing executives about how it ought to happen, but watching the queues, opening the tabs, sitting through the meeting where the bottleneck shows up. The engagement design comes from the floor, not from a theory.
What we leave with
- A written engagement brief — one page, signed by both sides.
- A single measurable target. If we can't name the number, we can't have the engagement.
- A list of what we will not do. Scope discipline starts in week one.
- A short list of risks, written plainly, including the ones the org has been declining to look at.
What we will not do here
- Write a strategy document that is read once and shelved.
- Recommend a tool stack as the deliverable.
- Take an engagement we don't believe will move the target.
Ship narrow. Measure the work.
Every engagement is built as a series of narrow vertical slices, each one of which is shipped to real users on a known cadence. We instrument every slice so the team can watch whether the target is actually moving — and adjust before time, money, or political capital is lost.
The cadence
- Monday
- The slice ships. Whatever was promised the previous Friday is in users' hands.
- Daily
- A short, written log entry. What moved, what didn't, what is now known that wasn't known yesterday.
- Friday
- Numbers against the target. Next slice scoped, including what gets cut to keep it narrow.
On AI in this phase
AI capabilities go into the slices in the same way every other feature does: behind an evaluation, in a real flow, measured against a real target. Demos are not a milestone. Shipped, evaluated, in-use work is a milestone.
Build the system a real team can operate at 11pm.
Once the work is moving the target, the engagement turns to hardening. The thing we built becomes the thing your team can actually run — with the documentation, evaluations, observability, and on-call story to match.
Hardening covers
- Evaluation harnesses for every AI-touched flow, with thresholds and on-failure behavior defined.
- Observability that surfaces the right signal, not all signals.
- On-call runbooks. Plainly written. Tested.
- Documentation in the codebase, not in a Notion that decays.
- A short, honest list of the system's remaining sharp edges.
Exit on a clean line. Stay reachable for one quarter.
The end of a good engagement is not when the consultant becomes indispensable. It is when the team has the work, owns it, and is shipping the next thing without us. We exit on a clean line and remain reachable, by appointment, for a quarter afterward — for the questions only we can answer.
After the engagement
- You own the codebase, the evals, and the runbooks outright. No license dependence on us.
- One scheduled check-in per month for a quarter, at no charge.
- Direct access for the one or two questions where months of context matter.
Money & time, written plainly.
An engagement is a finite thing. So is the bill for it.
The default. We are the senior operator inside one team for a finite, written engagement — typically four to twelve weeks.
- Single fixed quote, milestoned, on a written brief.
- Weekly numbers against a measurable target.
- Clear scope. Clear exit.
For teams that don't yet know what to build. Two weeks of deep work that ends with a written, scoped, defensible plan — not a deck.
- Two-week fixed engagement.
- Written brief, sized for the company that has to execute.
- Fee credits forward into a build engagement if we run one together.
For founders who don't need an embedded build but do need senior judgement on a recurring basis. Capacity limited; ask whether it's open.
- Monthly retainer, capped hours, no surprise invoices.
- Direct line. No SDR. No deck.
Closing.