// process
What happens
when we say yes.
A senior engineering studio runs differently than an agency. Here’s the actual cadence — week by week, deliverable by deliverable.
rot8 engagements run in three phases — Understand, Build, Ship. Discovery is a paid one-week sprint that fixes scope and quote. Build is bi-weekly demos against a shared Linear board. Ship is a real production cutover with monitoring, runbooks, and a documented handoff. No “kicks off in six weeks.” No vanishing acts.
- Last updated: 2026-05-04
- By the rot8 team
- Senior team only
// phase 01 · understand
Week 1 — Discovery (paid).
Cadence: 48-hour response · 1-week paid discovery
Within 48 hours of your application, you hear from a founder. If the fit is right, we start a one-week paid discovery sprint. One senior engineer and one senior designer go deep on your problem — your users, your business model, your existing system if there is one, the constraints you're really under (deadlines, regulators, investors).
What you get at end of week one
- Technical audit — written assessment of the system you have (or the system you need), in language a non-technical founder can read.
- Scope — the explicit list of what we will and won't build.
- Timeline — week-by-week schedule with named milestones and demo dates.
- Fixed quote — one number, valid for 30 days, no “phase two” surprises.
- Team lineup — the names of the senior designer and engineers who will own your project.
Cost: €8,000 (Sprint or Ship engagements credit this to the build); €4,000 for diagnostic-only rescues.
You can stop here.Many founders use the discovery output to scope an in-house plan. That's a clean outcome and we charge nothing additional for the privilege.
// phase 02 · build
Week 2 — N — Build.
Cadence: bi-weekly demos · async daily updates · shared codebase
Cadence
- Daily. Async written update in your Slack at end of business. Three lines: shipped today, blocked on, shipping tomorrow. No standups, no theater.
- Weekly. Written summary in Linear, with the next week's tickets prioritized.
- Bi-weekly. Live demo. 30 minutes max. Working software, not slides. Recorded for stakeholders who can't attend.
- Monthly. Written invoice with the line-item retrospective.
Shared from day one
- Your repo, with our team as collaborators.
- Your Linear / Jira / whatever you use, with our team writing tickets in your conventions.
- Your CI/CD, your staging environment, your error tracking.
- A dedicated Slack channel with rot8 and your team.
- Production deploys from week three, behind a feature flag if you’d prefer.
What we won’t ask for
- Weekly status meetings. The async update replaces them.
- Approval for every line of code. Your team reviews PRs the way they always do.
- Scope changes mid-sprint without a written change order. Scope is the contract.
// phase 03 · ship
Week N+1 — Ship.
Cadence: production cutover · monitoring · runbook · handoff
A real production launch — not a “soft launch in staging while we wait for QA.” We do production cutovers on Tuesdays or Wednesdays (never Friday) and stay on call for 72 hours after.
What ships with the launch
- Production deploy on the infrastructure agreed at discovery. DNS, SSL, CDN, edge caching configured.
- Monitoring + alerts — Sentry for errors, analytics, uptime checks, on-call rotation.
- Runbook — what to do when X breaks at 3am. Specific commands, not “consult documentation.”
- Architecture decision record — every structural decision we made, why we made it, what we'd revisit at scale.
- Handoff session — 90 minutes with your team. We walk the codebase, the deployment, the recovery procedures.
- 30-day stabilization window — we fix any production issues that surface in the first 30 days at no additional cost.
// constants
What’s the same in every engagement.
| Constant | Why it matters |
|---|---|
| Senior team only | No juniors on your project. No bench-warming. The names you meet on day one are the names that ship. |
| Designer + engineer paired from day one | Design-then-engineer relays kill products. Pairing kills the relay. |
| One named lead | One contact. Not an account manager. The lead writes code on your project. |
| Bi-weekly demos | Working software is the only honest project signal. |
| Async daily updates | Status meetings are the tax weak teams pay to look busy. We pay it asynchronously. |
| Documentation by default | Every change ships with notes. The work has to outlive us. |
| 30-day stabilization | Production is the start of the relationship, not the end. |
// when we say no
Two of every three applications.
We say no to roughly two of every three projects we get applications for. When we do:
- You hear within 48 hours. No three-week silences.
- You hear why. Specifically — not “not the right fit at this time.” Maybe the work is outside our specialty, maybe the budget is below the floor, maybe the timeline is unrealistic. Whatever it is, we tell you.
- You get a referral if we have one. If we know a freelancer or studio that fits your shape better, we'll name them. We don't take referral fees.
// quick answers
Process, common questions.
Why is the discovery sprint paid?
Because scoping is real engineering work. A senior engineer reads your codebase, designs the system, writes the technical plan, and stakes their name on a fixed quote. That takes a week and creates an artifact you can use whether you proceed with us or not. Free scoping is how agencies hide that the scope is wrong.What's a typical engagement length?
MVPs land at 8–16 weeks. Larger custom builds run 16–28 weeks. Embeds run from 6 months upward, month-to-month after the initial term. Sprints are 2 weeks fixed. Rescues are 1–4 weeks with optional Embed transition. We don’t run open-ended retainers disguised as projects.How do you handle scope changes?
Written change orders. If we’re 6 weeks into an 8-week build and you need an extra integration, we estimate the delta, you approve in writing, the timeline and quote update. We don’t slip scope quietly to “stay on schedule” — that’s how products ship buggy and trust evaporates.What happens after a project ships?
Three options. Hand the keys to your team with a 30-day stabilization window. Transition into Embed where we keep running engineering for you. Or shift to a sprint-as-needed cadence — we book occasional 2-week sprints when you need a senior strike. Most clients pick a mix of (2) and (3).Do you sign NDAs?
Yes — before the discovery sprint if the conversation requires sensitive disclosure. Standard mutual NDA, our template or yours. We don’t sign NDAs to receive a marketing pitch, but for any real product or technical disclosure, NDA first, conversation after.
// next step
Three projects this quarter. Two remain.
Apply with the four-step form. We respond inside 48 hours, every time, with a real reply from a named founder.