Process

Engagements are structured so technical risk surfaces early, scope stays negotiable, and delivery stays inspectable—not a black box that only opens at the deadline.

1. Discovery and alignment

Short working sessions to agree on goals, users, constraints, and what evidence would prove success. Outputs are usually a written picture of the system, rough sequencing, and explicit “out of scope” lines—not slideware for its own sake.

  • Problem statement and user journeys in plain language.
  • Risk register and spike candidates to run first if uncertainty is high.
  • Written success criteria and a proposed first milestone sized for review.

2. Architecture and plan

Choose patterns that fit the team and the life of the product: data flow, hosting boundaries, accessibility and performance budgets, and where reuse pays off. The plan names milestones small enough to ship or demo on a sensible cadence.

  • Architecture note: boundaries, data flow, and where state lives (browser, server, workers).
  • Milestone map with explicit sequencing and rollback/feature-flag strategy where helpful.
  • Non-functional targets: accessibility, performance, and operational basics spelled up front.

3. Incremental delivery

Implement behind feature flags or narrow releases where helpful; pair review with automated checks (types, tests, lint) so regressions are caught before they reach users. Documentation tracks decisions that future you will care about.

  • Working releases on a steady cadence—often vertical slices rather than horizontal “framework weeks.”
  • Growing automated test suite (unit, integration, and targeted E2E where ROI is clear).
  • Living changelog or decision log for meaningful behavior changes.

4. Hardening and handoff

Operational concerns—monitoring hooks, backups, runbooks, and knowledge transfer—are part of “done,” not an afterthought. Ongoing support is scoped explicitly rather than assumed.

  • Runbooks and on-call expectations; monitoring or logging hooks appropriate to the stack.
  • Handoff docs: how to deploy, rotate secrets, restore backups, and extend safely.
  • Explicit support window or transition plan if another team takes ownership.

For examples of how this plays out on real systems, see selected work and the individual case studies.