The Build engagement is the default shape of most KVB work. Same cadence whether the underlying service is Custom Software, SaaS, AI, or Data.
Named engineers, calibrated to the work.
Working software end of every sprint, never a roadmap deck.
Boring infrastructure, observability from day one.
30-day rolling termination after week 12. IP yours from day one.
The code is the obvious deliverable. The runbooks, the SLO catalog, the ADR log — those are the deliverables that outlast us.
In your repo from day one, trunk-based, gated CI, branch protection. Tests & coverage targets enforced.
Terraform/Pulumi for every resource. Reproducible from a clean account in under an hour. No clickops.
Logs, metrics, traces, SLOs, alerts — wired before the first user. Dashboards leadership can read.
Rotation, escalation policy, runbook per alert, drills. We carry the pager unless you want to.
Every major decision captured as an ADR. Quarterly written architecture review of what shipped, broke, and changed.
Short written summary to leadership: what shipped, what risks moved, what we’re watching. Not a status meeting.
After 12 weeks you have a system that runs, a team that knows it, and a documented operating posture. From there: continue, hand off, or both.
Repo, CI/CD, observability, auth, deploy. The dull plumbing that makes weeks four through forty fast.
Working end-to-end primary user journey by week 4. Telemetry that proves it works, not just builds.
SLOs declared, alerts tuned, runbooks written. The squad joins the on-call rotation (or takes it).
Quarterly architecture review document. Off-ramp planning. Continue / hand off / hybrid decision made in writing.
If something isn’t answered here, ask in your intro email — we keep this list short on purpose.
Yes, if you have a written architecture and risk register already. Otherwise we’ll fold a 1-week Discovery into the first month of Build.
We re-baseline at every quarterly review. Scope changes show up as a written change order with cost impact named. No surprise invoices.
Yes — most of our Build engagements are blended. We typically take 60–80% of the squad; you provide domain-rich engineers and product ownership.
A feature isn’t done until: it has tests, dashboards, an alert if applicable, a runbook for the alert, and someone on-call who can be paged. No “we’ll add observability later.”
Send a paragraph about the problem. We’ll come back inside 48 hours with a written take — team shape, cost envelope, riskiest assumptions.