What we need from you

A build moves at the pace of the slower side. Below is what we need from your team to keep the work on schedule. Most of it is one-time, gathered during the first week.

Before kickoff

A short checklist arrives in your inbox after you sign the SOW. It typically asks for:

People

• A single point of contact on your side — empowered to make decisions or get them made fast. One person, not a committee.
• Subject-matter experts we'll need to talk to (usually 1–3 people) and their availability.
• Anyone whose sign-off is required for launch (legal, compliance, executive) named up front, with their availability for a launch-readiness review.

Materials

• Existing documentation, decks, design files, requirements docs — half-finished is fine; we'd rather see the messy real thing than a polished version.
• Brand assets — logo files, fonts, brand guidelines if you have them.
• A representative data sample if we're going to be migrating or integrating data — even just 50 anonymized rows helps.

Access

• Read access to whatever existing tools we need to integrate with (CRM, payment processor, email, etc.).
• Domain registrar access or the ability to coordinate with whoever has it — needed at launch.
• Email-sending domain access if we're handling transactional email — DNS records to add.

If access is restricted (your legal team requires NDAs, your security team requires SSO onboarding, etc.), we plan around it. We just need to know up front.

During the build

Per sprint, we ask for:

• 45 minutes at the end of the sprint for the demo.
• Decisions returned within one business day when we ping you.
• Reviews of work that's pending your approval — usually content, copy, or design choices.

Heavier weeks happen — content review for a marketing site, integration testing for a platform, training for a complex back-office tool. Those are flagged a sprint in advance so your team can plan around them.

At launch

For launch specifically, we need:

• Final content sign-off from whoever owns it on your side
• DNS access or coordination with whoever holds it
• Legal/compliance sign-off if applicable, completed at least 3 days before launch
• A 30-minute launch call the day-of
• Designated person on Slack/email for the first 72 hours after launch

More on what launch involves →

After launch (in a retainer)

Retainers are even lighter. Per month:

• 30 minutes for the monthly check-in
• Decisions on requests — usually within a day
• Approval before work that exceeds the monthly hour pool

That's it. The retainer model is designed to need very little of your time in any given month.

What happens if we don't have what we need

When inputs are missing or decisions are stalled, the work parks. We don't burn hours flailing without inputs — we surface the blocker, list what we need from you, and pause until it's there.

If a stall lasts more than a few days, we may rebalance the sprint to other work in your scope. If a stall affects the launch date, we'll surface that immediately so you can decide between getting unblocked, accepting a slip, or cutting scope.

Where to go next

Decision-making → Communication cadence →