Process
From first call to your team shipping without us.
Six phases. Each one has a job, a duration, and a deliverable you can point to. No black-box sprints — you see what's being built as it's being built.
The arc
A typical engagement, end to end.
Durations are typical, not rigid — we calibrate in the scoping call based on scope, stage, and how much discovery has already happened.
00
Scoping call
30 minutes
Founder · delivery manager · senior engineer
What happens
We map the problem, the stage, the surface area, and the runway. No pitch — either the fit is there or it isn't, and we'll tell you in the call.
Outcome
A one-page scope hypothesis and a fit / no-fit signal.
01
Discovery & risk mapping
Week 1
Founder · PM · designer · senior engineer
What happens
We translate the scope hypothesis into Cagan's four risks — value, usability, feasibility, viability — and design a specific test for each one. Contract, calendar, and team roster are locked here.
Outcome
Signed SOW, a test plan for each risk, and a delivery calendar.
02
Validate before we build
Weeks 1–3
Designer · senior engineer · founder
What happens
Concierge tests with five to ten target users. Click-through prototype iterated until it works without a tutorial. Two-day technical spike on the highest-risk slice of scope. Unit-economics check on the business viability side.
Outcome
Go / no-go on scope, a validated design, and a technical risk we've already retired.
03
Build
Weeks 3–N
PM · designer · engineers
What happens
Monday kickoff, Friday demo, staging deploy from the first merge. CI and the test suite go in before any feature does. We ship incrementally — every week there's something live you can use, not a quarterly reveal.
Outcome
Production-ready incremental releases. No demo-ware.
04
Launch
1–2 weeks
Senior engineer · DevOps · founder
What happens
Production deploy to your infra — your AWS, your Vercel, your EC2. Monitoring, error tracking, TLS, backups, runbooks. A load test if the workload warrants it. DNS cutover with a rollback plan.
Outcome
Live product on infrastructure your team can maintain, with a written runbook.
05
Handover
Weeks N+1 to N+2
Engineers · your team
What happens
Pair programming with your hires. Documentation walkthrough. CI and on-call transitioned. A recorded architecture tour. We stay reachable for the first month post-handover — not as a retainer, just so nothing falls through.
Outcome
Your team owns the codebase and can ship the next release without us.
What makes this different
Four things we won't move on.
The defaults that distinguish a studio engagement from a dev-shop engagement. These don't flex — they're what make the rest of the process work.
01
Risks tested before code
Every engagement starts with the four Cagan risks and a specific test for each. We won't commit to a build timeline until the tests pass.
02
Design validated before build
Click-through prototypes tested with real users — the version that tests well is the version we build. Engineering doesn't start from a brief; it starts from a prototype that already works.
03
Staging from day one
The staging environment exists before the first feature does. Every merge deploys. You see what's being built as it's being built, not at the launch demo.
04
Handover planned from week one
The team composition, documentation structure, and CI pipeline are designed around the handover on day one — not retrofitted the week before we leave.
Ready for phase 00?
The scoping call is 30 minutes, no pitch. Tell us where you are and we'll tell you whether we're the right studio for what's next.