How we work

From "we have a problem" to live in production.

Most engagements ship in 4–8 weeks. Same four steps every time. Fixed price, no surprise invoices, all IP yours from day one.

Step 1 · Day 0
20 min
Discovery call
We listen. You describe the problem in your words. We ask the questions that matter — current workflow, who owns it, what's been tried, what would shipping mean. Free, no deck, no pitch. If we're not the right team, we'll say so on the call.
You walk away with
- Honest go / no-go signal
- Recommended engagement model (sprint / retainer / hourly)
- Rough timeline and budget envelope
Step 2 · Day 1–7
1–2 weeks
Scope & SOW
Deep discovery — interviews, code/data review, technical risk audit. We come back with a fixed-scope SOW: what's in, what's out, what it costs, what could change it. You sign or you don't. No mystery, no surprise invoices, no scope creep.
You walk away with
- Written SOW with milestones and acceptance criteria
- Fixed price (or retainer/hourly structure)
- List of dependencies on your side (access, data, sign-off owners)
Step 3 · Week 1–6
4–6 weeks typical
Build & weekly demos
Senior engineers, working in your repo from week one. Weekly demos — you see real code running, not slides. Bi-weekly retros. Tight feedback loop. We catch direction-changes early when they're cheap.
You walk away with
- Working code at every weekly demo
- Eval suite, observability, and docs as we go
- Production-ready by the final week
Step 4 · Week 6+
1–2 weeks
Ship & hand off
Production launch, runbook handover, knowledge transfer to your team. Code, prompts, agent configs, and ops docs all transferred to your repository. We're available on hourly retainer if you want us for tuning or extensions, but you don't owe us anything beyond the SOW.
You walk away with
- Production deploy
- Runbook + on-call playbook
- All IP transferred to your accounts

Principles we hold to

Working code beats slides.
We demo working code at every milestone. If we don't have something to show, that's a status problem we resolve before the meeting — not a slide we hide it behind.
Discovery is non-optional.
Most fixed-fee overruns come from skipped discovery. We invest 1–2 weeks upfront specifically to avoid that. If we're not confident, we'll say so and propose a paid discovery sprint first.
Senior on every project.
No juniors learning on your dime. Backed by Alian Software's engineering bench so we don't have to compromise on seniority to meet a price.
Your IP, day one.
Code, prompts, configs — all transferred to your repos from the first commit. No vendor lock-in disguised as 'our framework.'