Method
// THE STANDARD
Every engagement runs against the same standard: Useful. Measurable. Adopted. Scalable.
A piece of work succeeds when it solves a real business problem, when the people it serves actually adopt it, and when the result is measured in terms the business already understands. Anything short of that is an interesting demo, and I don’t sell demos.
The shape of an engagement
Five phases, in order. Skipping one is the most reliable way I know to guarantee rework.
- Discover — I sit with the people doing the work until the goal, the constraints, and the actual workflow are documented, not assumed.
- Prioritize — I weigh value, feasibility, urgency, and risk, then say plainly what is worth building and what is not.
- Build — I deliver the work with the business, data, and engineering people who have to live with it kept in the room.
- Adopt — the work only counts if people use it, so rollout, training, and the feedback loop are part of the job, not an afterthought.
- Measure — success is defined before I build and reported after, against the baseline we wrote down.
The case lifecycle
Every case moves through eight stages, each with an explicit exit criterion. I never advance a case until its current stage is genuinely complete — that one rule prevents most of the failure I have seen in this kind of work.
| Stage | What it means | It exits when |
|---|---|---|
| Intake | Opportunity identified | Stakeholder, problem, and owner are named |
| Discovery | Current state understood | Workflow, pain point, and success metric are documented |
| Prioritization | Value and feasibility assessed | The case is accepted, deferred, or rejected |
| Design | Approach defined | Approach, owners, risks, and plan are documented |
| Build | Work is delivered | A pilot or production-ready build is complete |
| Adoption | People start using it | Users trained, rollout complete, feedback loop live |
| Measurement | Impact assessed | Before / after results are documented |
| Scale / Close | Expanded or completed | Learnings captured, next step decided |
Measurable or it does not count
I read impact at three levels, so a single win and a whole portfolio of work can both be judged clearly.
- Case — every case defines success before implementation and reports results after: hours saved, faster turnaround, conversion lifted, fewer errors.
- Program — related cases group into programs; that is where small, well-measured wins compound.
- P&L — where possible, results map to the P&L, so leadership reads what changed in the vocabulary it already uses: revenue influenced, cost avoided, margin improved.
Every case names the value it is after — Time, Cost, Revenue, Risk, or Experience — and how that value shows up:
- Direct — a measurable change you can point to: fewer hours on a task.
- Influenced — a contribution to an outcome: a faster sales cycle.
- Enabling — a capability that unlocks future value: better data quality.
In the case records, a target is labeled a target and a measured result measured. The two never blur.
Operating principles
- Business problem first. I start with your definition of success; technology is only useful when it produces a better business outcome.
- Measurable or it does not count. Every case gets a baseline, a target, and a practical way to measure the difference.
- Practical over theoretical. I favor useful, adopted, maintainable work over elegant ideas that never leave the slide deck.
- Reusable when possible. When a build can become a repeatable capability across teams, I design with that future in mind.
- Stakeholders stay close. I don’t disappear into a build cycle; you keep visibility into status, decisions, risks, and expected outcomes.
- Small wins compound. Not every case needs to be massive; a series of well-measured improvements creates real leverage.
How this meets the engagement model
The three ways to engage are this method at three durations:
- The Read — $4,500, one week, one written go / no-go. The lifecycle applied to a single question: discovery, prioritization, and a decision, compressed into one week.
- A Build — $6,500–$25,000, fixed price, fixed window, one at a time. One case run end to end, intake through measurement.
- The Retainer — $6,000/month floor, about two days a month, at most two concurrent. Keeps the measurement honest after shipping: adoption checked, numbers re-read, the next case queued.
If you want the work itself rather than the method behind it, my studio keeps 25 years of dated work on the record.