How We Work
Our integrated delivery framework: Ignite, Innovate, and Capstone. One cohesive process, three phases.
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 a slide deck of advice. You leave with the work:
- a synthesis of business goals and contraints, drawn from conversations with multiple stakeholders across your org
- a recommended future-state architecture, with the tradeoffs named
- 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 fixed-scope statement of work for the build, if you choose to do one
We read your system through whichever lenses fit, and most situations need a few at once: resilience when it fails in ways you can’t recover from cleanly, scale when the design won’t take you where you’re headed, cost when the spend has outrun the explanation, trust when you have to prove it’s secure or compliant, and edge when it reaches devices in the field you can’t see or trust. We’ve run this play across hundreds of engagements since 2012, so whatever is in front of you is usually a shape we’ve taken apart before.
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 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, not vanity metrics. Progress is visible, reversible, 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, typically three to twelve months, 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.
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.