Services - Craft & Constraint

01 · Discovery Engagement

Discovery Engagement

A focused, time-bounded piece of work built around structured conversations — with leadership, production, engineering, and wherever else the real picture lives. It establishes what the team believes it's building, what's getting in the way, and where the leverage points are. It ends with findings concrete enough to act on.

Duration: One to two weeks.
Cost frame: Fixed fee, scoped and agreed before work begins. Starts with a no-obligation conversation.
Ideal client: A studio head, MD, or COO who senses something is wrong but can't see it clearly from where they sit. Often a multi-team studio where informal coordination has stopped working.
Recent example: A mid-sized studio whose milestones kept slipping despite a capable team. Two weeks of conversations across leadership and production surfaced a dependency between two teams that no plan acknowledged. Naming it changed the schedule conversation, and the next milestone landed.

02 · Embedded Engagement

Embedded Engagement

Sustained, hands-on involvement through a specific challenge, transition, or inflection point — working alongside the team as an embedded partner, not an outside observer. The shape depends on what the team needs: delivery leadership, programme oversight, cross-team alignment, or the experienced person in the room. Usually some combination.

Duration: Two days a week, typically over six to twelve weeks.
Cost frame: Day-rate based. Often follows a Discovery Engagement; can begin directly where the problem is already understood.
Ideal client: Studios of roughly 100–300 people at a complexity inflection point — organisational change, shared technology, live service products, priorities that conflict across teams. Also smaller teams building their first real delivery structure.
Recent example: A shared-technology group supporting several game teams at once, each with a legitimate claim to be first. Twelve weeks embedded with the leads produced a priority model the teams actually used — because they helped build it — and escalations stopped landing on the studio head's desk.