Software gets shaped by whoever is in the room. This is the invitation.

The tools arrive shaped around somebody else's estate

Every data tool you have bought was designed against a handful of estates that were not yours. The assumptions it makes about how your definitions are owned, reviewed and changed were settled before you saw it, and the gap between those assumptions and your organisation is the work your team absorbs for as long as you run it.

By the time a product is something you can buy, that gap is fixed. The decisions that produced it were made in conversations you were not part of, and the feedback you give afterwards competes with everybody else's.

The alternative is to be in the conversation while the decisions are still open, which is a narrow window and is the one that is open now.

How it works

A design partnership is a working relationship rather than a discount, so it is worth being plain about both sides of it.

• What you get

  Direct time with the person building the Platform, work done against your estate rather than a demonstration of somebody else's, and the decisions about what gets built next made with your problems on the table. Whatever is learned about your estate is yours to keep.

• What is asked of you

  Time from somebody who actually knows how your data estate works, a real problem rather than a sanitised one, and the kind of feedback that says a thing is wrong while it is still cheap to change.

• How the work runs

  It opens with a scoping conversation and an honest answer about whether there is a fit. From there the work runs in short cycles against something specific in your estate, reviewed together as it goes. Nothing about your business is published anywhere without your written agreement.