Strategy

Every project starts with the same question: what are we actually building, and why? Not the feature list -- the reason the feature list exists. We run a strategy phase before any design or development work because the most expensive bug is building the wrong thing.

We start with your business goals, your users, and your constraints. Budget, timeline, team size, existing systems, regulatory requirements. Everything that shapes what is realistic and what is not. We document this in a scope document that both sides sign off on before work begins.

The output is a project brief with clear deliverables, timelines, and success criteria. Not a 40-page document nobody reads -- a concise artifact that the entire team references throughout the project. If something is not in the brief, we are not building it. If something needs to change, we update the brief first.

Strategy is not a one-time phase. We revisit assumptions at every milestone. User feedback, technical discoveries, and market changes all affect what we should build next. A good strategy adapts. A rigid plan breaks.

The teams that skip strategy end up doing it anyway -- they just call it "rework" and it costs three times as much.