How We Work
Stuck? We’ve got a plan… Our integrated delivery framework: Ignite, Innovate, and Capstone provides a structured, yet flexible, process for untangling complex business requirements.
Ignite
Our Ignite is a fixed-fee, eight-day engagement led by senior architects who do the work, not a discovery team you’ll never see again.
We spend the first days with your product and engineering teams, going deep on how the system actually works and where it actually hurts. Then we go heads-down and do the engineering: we draw the current and future-state architecture, model the real cost, and turn what we found into a costed, sequenced plan for the build.
You don’t leave with an upsell sales pitch or a slide deck of advice. Instead, the deliverables include:
- a synthesis of business goals and constraints, drawn from conversations with multiple stakeholders across your org (getting your teams aligned here often makes this stage more valuable than even the technical outputs)
- a recommended future-state architecture, with the tradeoffs named
- a gap analysis between current and future states
- a cost model you can hand to finance
- a prioritized backlog with real effort estimates
- an executive summary your stakeholders can read without having sat through the week
- a statement of work for the build, if you choose to do one
Our Ignite engagements are built from a common core, oriented through 2–3 outcome-specific lenses; each used to sharpen and steer the solutioning around your unique needs:
| Ignite Lens | The Usual Suspects | RBN Points of Focus |
|---|---|---|
| Resilience |
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| Scale |
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| Cost |
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| Trust |
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| Edge |
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We’ve run this play across more than 100 engagements since 2012, so whatever is in front of you is usually a shape we’ve taken apart before. Crucially, your team helps guide the conversation throughout the Ignite so we can jointly uncover the real blind spots and landmines.
The output is yours to keep regardless of what comes next. If the build is worth doing, you have a plan you can act on, with us or with anyone. And if our honest read is that you shouldn’t do it, or shouldn’t pay us to, we’ll say so in writing. We would rather lose the next phase than sell you one you don’t need.
Innovate
Innovate is where the plan becomes a working system. We execute against the design from the Ignite using a flexible staffing model that scales the team up and down as the work demands, so you are never paying for capacity you don’t need. Senior engineers stay close to the code and the decisions, and the same people who scoped the problem are the ones who build the solution.
Throughout the phase we measure outcomes against the goals we set at the start and iterate, using two-week sprint structures that are already familiar to your product teams. Progress is visible and tied to the things your business actually cares about: reliability, cost, time-to-release, and the confidence of your own team. The engagement lasts as long as the work warrants and ends when you can run what we built without us.
Capstone
Capstone is the phase we deliberately do not scope in advance, because it isn’t ours to scope. It is whatever comes after the core work is done and the system is yours: a long-term support arrangement, an occasional architecture review, a coaching relationship with your team, or simply knowing where to find us when the next hard problem shows up. At this stage, every client has different needs.
We design every engagement so that you are not dependent on us by the end of it. That’s the point. Capstone exists on your terms and your timeline, defined by what you need next rather than by a contract we wrote up front. You decide what comes next, and we’re here when you do.
Start with Ignite.
Tell us what you're working on and we'll tell you, honestly, whether an eight-day Ignite is the right place to begin.