How an engagement starts
Most of what goes wrong in the first month of outside delivery was decided before day one. Access that is not there, a slice of the roadmap nobody wrote down, a report with no reader. We plan the start within thirty days of signing. This page says what has to be true on both sides for that date to hold.
Before day one
Five things, each with an owner. Each one that is missing moves the start date by the time it takes to obtain. We say so in writing rather than absorb it silently into the first report.
- Paper
- The agreement names the slice of the roadmap the pod owns in its first quarter, with deliverables and dates. Vendor onboarding on your side starts the week of signing, not the week the first invoice is due. At a publisher it is the item that most often moves a start date.
- Access
- Accounts on your source control, build system, issue tracker and telemetry for each person in the pod, with the permissions the slice needs. Each person does one checkout and one local build the day before day one, so the first morning is not spent on a missing permission.
- Clearance
- Whatever you require of external people: NDA, background check, security training, and the platform holder’s own confidentiality steps where console devkits are involved. Each person’s status is recorded with a date.
- Equipment and place
- You provide devkits, licences and source control. Seats on site, or core hours remote, are booked before day one.
- The report
- One named recipient and one weekday for the weekly report, agreed before the first one is written.
The first month
- Day one
- The pod is in your working channels, your calendar and your meetings, not in a side channel. The lead reads the release history for the last four quarters and opens the dashboards your leadership uses.
- The first Friday
- The first weekly report goes out, even if it is short. Late is not an option; short is. You learn what the report is from the first one, and so does the pod.
- Weeks two to four
- The pod owns its slice. Every deliverable has a date, and status against it is red or green with no middle level. The first red is never a surprise, because it was a risk with an owner and a date in the report before it.
- Month one
- The pod’s first monthly internal review with Alexander, against the same report you received. Nothing is prepared for it that you did not see.
Your code and your data
- Work happens in your source control, your build system and your accounts. Nothing is copied out of your environment to do the work.
- The seniors in a pod work AI-first. Before day one we tell you which tools are used on your code and follow your policy on them, including disclosure.
- Engagements are referred to by a code in our own records, never by your name.
Starting smaller
You do not have to start with a pod. A single builder-lead engagement of two to three months follows the same start. The same access, the same slice written down, the same weekly report from the first Friday. At the end you hold the shipped slice and a written plan for what a pod would deliver next. See what that plan looks like.