The Systems Engine · Workflow Sprint
Two weeks. One process.
Handed back running.
A bounded engagement. Fixed fee. I take the process eating your team's week apart, rebuild it as an automated system they own, and hand it back running. The fastest way to see how I work before you commit to anything larger.
01The argumentWhy sprint before retainer
Senior consulting usually starts with a leap. You sign a three or six month retainer, hoping the work justifies the number, and hoping the person you hired can actually operate at your scale.
A workflow sprint reverses that. Two weeks, a published scope, one automated system your team owns at the end of it. If that lands and you want to keep going, we talk about the seat. If it does not, you kept the system, you kept your money on everything except this one project, and you now have a working piece of infrastructure your team can run without me.
Nobody at this level publishes a bounded first step, which is the whole point.
—The checkAny two, it’s a sprint
Five processes eat most teams’ week. If any two of these are yours, the diagnosis is the same one, and the next step is a two-week sprint.
Common thread: the process runs, but only because someone senior touches it every week.
02The two weeksWhat happens, in order
Audit
Deep look at the process, the current tools, who touches it, where it dies. The first day is stakeholder conversations. The second is watching the work actually happen and mapping it.
Architect
The pipeline gets designed on paper. Model stack. Agent layer. Human gates. What gets automated, what stays a human decision, where the return path from performance data feeds back in.
Approval gate
You review the architecture and the scope before a line of code gets written. If the shape is wrong, we fix it here. If it is right, we build.
Build
The automated pipeline stands up in your stack. Real inputs, real outputs, running end to end. Not a prototype. Not a demo. A working system.
Live test
Your team runs the system against a real piece of work while I watch and correct. Any friction gets patched before handoff, not after.
Handoff
Documentation, a recorded async walkthrough your team can refer back to, credentials transferred, one post-launch check-in booked for two weeks out.
03What you receiveDeliverables
- The automated pipeline itself, running in your stack against real work.
- Model Context Protocol servers and API integrations wired to your tools, credentials transferred to you.
- Documentation your team can maintain. Runbook, prompt library, failure modes and how to fix them.
- A recorded async walkthrough, so a new hire can be up on the system in an hour.
- One post-launch check-in call, two weeks after handoff, to catch anything the first fortnight surfaced.
- Full ownership. You own what you paid for. If we do not work together again, the system keeps running.
04The system you getWhat it looks like running
Agentic AI operating systems for the business you already run. Five modules of business get their own agent stack, an orchestrator with your human gate on top, and an MCP layer that plugs into the tools you already use. This is the shape of every engine that ships in the two weeks.
05Sprint-shaped workWhat this looks like when it ships
TreeRaise
Custom AI Gems designed as guardrails for the brand voice. A modular prompt system that lets a lean team scale content across hundreds of touchpoints without drift. The pattern the sprint installs, applied end to end.
Read the case →The Open House
A full listing campaign pipeline: brief in, cinematic hero reel plus horizontal cuts plus vertical shorts out. Six videos delivered from one brief through a system designed to be re-run on the next property.
Read the case →The Learning Ladder
Five interactive learning components, Level 1 through Level 5, running live on this site. The Learning Studio's ladder is a sprint output: a component library that keeps producing at consistent quality without me in the room.
Open the ladder →Everything else
130+ projects across ten industries, fifteen years. The complete body of work, including the engagements these systems were built inside.
Open work →06The engagementWhere this sits
The Workflow Sprint is the bounded first-step of the Systems Engine pillar. It is what a two-week commission looks like when you want the machine installed before you want the seat that runs it.
The workflow sprint is the entry point to The Systems Engine pillar. Fixed fee, published on the Services page, credits against a fractional seat if you decide to continue after the two weeks.
Read the CCTO piece for the full argument behind the seat: what a Chief Creative Technology Officer owns.
07Straight answersCommon questions
What kinds of processes are good candidates?
Anything a team touches every week that has a repeatable shape and lives partly in judgment: content production, brief-to-asset pipelines, research and synthesis, quality review, brand-voice consistency at volume. Not one-off strategy work. Not decisions that should not be automated in the first place.
What if my team is not technical?
Better. The sprint is designed to hand back a system a non-engineering team can run. If your team was already technical enough to build this, you would not need me. The documentation is written for the person who will actually operate it, not the person who built it.
What happens after the two weeks?
Three paths. You run the system and I disappear. You book the post-launch check-in and stop there. Or the sprint proves the fit and we roll into a fractional seat, where the sprint fee credits toward the first month.
Can it scale into a larger engagement?
Yes. Most sprint clients that turn into retainers do so because the first system revealed the second one that needed building. The retainer is a series of these, running against a shared architecture, with the person who built it staying in the seat to keep the standard.
08Start
If a process is eating your team's week,
start with the sprint.
No forms. No funnels. One direct conversation.