An operating model — not a project template.
Seven phases. Repeatable structure, never identical execution. Each phase produces an artifact your team can act on — and audit if something goes wrong.
Discovery
Week 1 – 2Stakeholder interviews, product audits, competitive landscape, and a measurable success metric agreed before contracts.
- What does success look like in 6 months?
- Who are the actual users — not the persona, the real people?
- What has been tried before and why did it fail?
- What constraints are non-negotiable?
Skipping this phase is the single most common cause of scope-creep on month four. Everything downstream is cheaper when the problem is precisely defined.
Strategy
Week 2 – 4Product narrative, IA, technical architecture, risk register, and a sequenced roadmap with clear off-ramps.
- What's the minimum viable architectural decision?
- Where are the technical risks and how do we hedge them?
- What does the team need to build vs. buy vs. configure?
- What's the riskiest assumption — and how do we test it first?
Strategy memos are living documents. We version-control them. When scope changes, we update the memo — not just the Jira board. This prevents the 'but we agreed' argument at month six.
UI/UX Design
Week 3 – 8Lo-fi → hi-fi → motion. Tokens, components, journeys, accessibility, prototypes — handed off to engineering as production code.
- Does this flow reduce cognitive load or add to it?
- How does this component behave at the edge case?
- Is this motion purposeful or decorative?
- Can a user complete the core task without reading any text?
We lock structure before we design aesthetics. A beautiful design on a wrong information architecture is debt you pay for years. We validate the journey before we colour the components.
Engineering
Week 4 – 16+TypeScript, Next.js, infra-as-code, CI/CD, code review on every PR. Weekly demos, never status updates.
- Is this the simplest implementation that meets the requirement?
- What does the failure mode look like — and is it graceful?
- Is this observable? Can the on-call engineer understand what's happening at 2am?
- Will the next engineer understand why this decision was made?
We run weekly demos — not status updates. A demo forces working software. A status update forces PowerPoints. We've found demos catch scope misalignment 4× faster than any written report.
Testing & QA
Week 12 – 18Unit, integration, E2E, accessibility, performance budgets, security review. Real devices, real networks.
- Does this work on a 3G connection in Southeast Asia?
- Can a screen reader navigate this without a mouse?
- What happens when the API returns a 429?
- Is the P75 within budget on the slowest device we've defined?
We don't test in staging and declare victory. We test on real devices, real networks, and real browsers. Every release-readiness report includes a performance diff vs. the previous sprint.
Launch
Week 16 – 18Canary deploys, observability, runbooks, post-launch analytics, and a written launch-week war-room schedule.
- Do we have rollback within 5 minutes?
- Who is on-call and what are their escalation paths?
- Is observability live before a single user hits the URL?
- What's the canary percentage and what's the kill switch?
We do not launch on Fridays. We do not launch without a written war-room schedule. We do not declare launch complete until the 48-hour post-launch analytics review is done and documented.
Growth Support
OngoingRetainer-based optimization, experimentation, SEO, performance budgets, and quarterly strategic reviews.
- What did we learn from this quarter that changes the next one?
- Which experiment produced the highest-confidence result?
- Is the performance budget still within spec after the last feature sprint?
- What's the retention curve telling us that the acquisition data isn't?
Growth support is not a sales upsell. It's a structural phase. The best product decisions come from the team that built the thing — because they understand the constraints. We build retainers into most engagements at the outset.
Questions we get before every project.
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