How we work
Four phases, three ways to engage, and a first week you can measure us against. This page is the operating manual for every QuantmHill engagement — read it now, hold us to it later.
The process
Four phases, in order, every time — not because process is sacred, but because each phase exists to kill a specific way software projects die. Every phase ends with artifacts you keep.
See what the process producesPhase 01
We start by reading, not proposing. Senior engineers go through your codebase, your infrastructure, and your delivery history, then interview the people who live with the system every day. You get a written diagnosis you can act on — with us or without us.
What you get
Phase 02
The diagnosis becomes a plan you could hand to any competent team. Milestones map to outcomes you can verify, not activity we can bill, and the riskiest technical decisions get design docs before a line of production code is written.
What you get
Phase 03
Senior engineers ship in weekly increments, with tests and CI from the first commit. You see working software every week, and every decision that shaped it lands in a written record — so nothing important lives in one person’s head.
What you get
Phase 04
When the system works, we make it survivable without us. We document, instrument, and hand over — or scale the team up if the roadmap demands it. Either way, you are never renting knowledge you can’t keep.
What you get
Engagement models
You won’t find prices here — cost depends on shape and duration, and we’d rather scope honestly than anchor low. What never changes: the senior bar, the four phases, and the written cadence.
Not sure which shape fits? Most engagements start as a project and earn their way into a retainer. Ask us which fits
Tooling
When you already have a stack, we work in it. When the choice is ours, this is what we reach for — boring where boring wins, current where it pays for itself.
Build
Infra
Comms
Week one
The first five days set the pattern for everything after. Here’s how they run — and yes, day five means a demo of working software, not a deck.
Day 1
You meet the whole team — everyone who will write code is on the call, no bait-and-switch. We agree the comms cadence, sort access, and leave you a written plan for the week.
Day 2
Repos, infrastructure, and docs get read before anyone asks you a question that’s already answered. Open questions land in a shared doc you can respond to async.
Day 3
A draft milestone plan and risk list appear in your tracker, not in a slide deck. You comment, we revise the same day.
Day 4
CI is green, environments are reproducible, and a first real pull request is merged — a bug fix or a missing metric, something that matters.
Day 5
A half-hour walkthrough of what shipped and the plan for week two, recorded so anyone who missed it can catch up async.
Book a strategy call. We’ll reply within one business day with an honest read — including whether we’re the wrong fit.
