Approach
Outcome first. Evidence throughout. Live is not the finish line.
Five steps that tie the deal, the architecture and the evidence together, from handoff to steady live use.
Start with the outcome
What problem it solves, why now, what success looks like in numbers, and what volume is expected.
Requirements arrive already translated, usually more than once. My first job is to get those four answers down in a line each. If nobody can say what happens when the date slips, there is no compelling reason yet, and that is worth knowing before anyone plans a sprint.
Check every promise
I check anything promised in the sales process against current docs or a test, and label it.
Each capability the deal relies on gets marked documented, observed or inferred, with the source beside it. Anything I cannot find goes on the risk list on day one, not in week seven. I never assume the test environment behaves like production.
Give every dependency an owner
Yours, your customer's or a third party's. Each gets a name, a date and its impact on launch.
Slips usually come from people and access, not code: a team that has not been freed up, frontend work nobody scheduled, a compliance question with no owner, credentials that take weeks to arrive. I map them in week one. Anything launch cannot do without goes on one list and everything else on another, so the extras never quietly move the date.
Launch on evidence
A checklist item is ticked only with a log, a test result or a config next to it.
Anything the sandbox could not prove gets tried once in production, at low value, with one person watching it from start to finish. Whoever makes the launch call writes it down, with the reasons and any risk knowingly accepted.
Measure adoption
A month after launch, I check actual usage against what was expected.
The review looks at completion rates, drop-off, errors and coverage gaps, finds the cause of any shortfall and names an owner for the fix. Expansion comes after the current flow is working, not instead of it.
The shape of it
Where a piece of work actually travels
A signed deal does not turn into live volume on its own. It passes through discovery, architecture, testing and go-live, and any of those can quietly drop part of what was agreed.
Signed deal
What was promised
- Promises checked
Discovery
What is actually needed
Promises checked
Architecture
Who owns which state
Webhooks & state
Webhooks & state- API harness
Build & test
What the sandbox can prove
API harness
Go-live
Ticked with evidence
Agent skills
Agent skillsExpected volume
What the deal assumed
Getting started
How the first two weeks run
A short call first, to see whether the problem fits. If it does, I normally start with a scoped discovery: the business outcome, the promises made in the deal, the systems involved and who owns each part of them.
At the end you get a written summary with a gap list, a risk list and the questions that block the architecture, each one with an owner. It is useful on its own. Sometimes that is all a team needs to get moving.
Where the work continues, it continues under one of the four engagement models on the services page, with the scope and the measures agreed before it starts.
Got something stuck?
Describe where it is stuck and I will give you an honest read on what is blocking it and what it would take to move.