A repeatable method,
not a creative process.
We have shipped enough engagements to recognize the shape of the work. Discovery, Design, Build, Operate — four stages, the same checklist each time. Predictability is the feature.
By Web4Guru AI Operations Team Published Updated 9 min read
The questions before the keyboard.
We start with a structured intake interview, usually 60–90 minutes. It is not a sales call. The objective is to find the operational bottleneck that, if removed, would create measurable headroom in the business.
We ask: what work is being done that the business owner wishes someone else were doing? Where do tasks queue up past their useful window? Which existing tools are believed to solve a problem that they are not actually solving? What does "done" look like, in numbers, six months from now?
Discovery ends with a written brief: the problem, the constraints, the success criteria, and the candidate workflows we want to scope. Nothing gets built until that brief is countersigned.
Spec first, build second.
Design produces three deliverables: a workflow map, a data map, and an approval map. Together they describe how the agents will operate, where their inputs come from, and which decisions a human keeps.
We default to keeping humans on the gate for anything client-facing during the first 30 days. Approval can move asynchronously — but it does not move silently.
Design is also where we name the metrics that will tell us whether the build worked. We will not ship something whose success cannot be measured.
Two-week sprints, weekly checkpoint.
Build is structured as two-week sprints. Each sprint has a single demo deliverable — the customer sees something real running on real data by the end of week one of every sprint, with refinement landing in week two.
We hold a weekly checkpoint with the customer's operational owner. The agenda is the same every week: what shipped, what surfaced, what changes for next week. No status decks, no theater.
Pilots are typically two sprints. Larger engagements run three to five sprints before transitioning to operate mode.
Hand off to steady state with SLAs.
Once a workflow is stable we transition it to operate mode. The customer keeps full visibility through the dashboard; we keep monitoring on the agents themselves. Routine adjustments — copy tweaks, segment changes, prompt tuning — land within one business day.
Each operating engagement carries a written SLA: response windows for inbound questions, escalation path for incidents, quarterly review of metrics against the original Design success criteria.
New workflows added during operate mode follow the same four-stage method on a smaller scale. The point is that the customer is never surprised.