How we work: small teams, written decisions, weekly demos
The three habits that do most of the work in every CMBYTES engagement.
1 min read
Clients sometimes ask for our process, expecting a diagram. The truth is simpler. Most of what makes our projects work comes from three habits, applied consistently.
Small, senior teams
A typical CMBYTES engagement is three to six people: engineers, a designer, and a product lead who owns the outcome with the client. Small teams communicate faster, and seniority means fewer handoffs — the person who designs the data model also writes the migration and reviews the API that uses it.
Decisions in writing
Anything that will be expensive to reverse gets a short written decision: the context, the options we considered, what we chose and why. It is rarely more than a page. It means a client can see our reasoning, a new team member can catch up in an afternoon, and six months later nobody has to reconstruct why the system looks the way it does.
Working software, every week
Every week, we demo software that runs — not slides, not designs, not a status report. Real features in a real environment, with real data wherever possible. Weekly demos keep everyone honest. Problems surface in days rather than at the end of a phase, and clients steer the product while steering is still cheap.
None of this is novel. It is simply what we have found to work, and we would rather do a few simple things every week than a sophisticated process occasionally.