Process
Every Agent Implementations engagement runs on a fixed 30-day timeline. Not because 30 days is a magic number, but because the constraint is what makes the sprint work. A deadline with real consequences forces good decisions. When there's no end date, there's no urgency to resolve tradeoffs.
Here's what happens in each week of the sprint, and why the sequence matters.
The scoping call happens before the engagement starts — it's how we decide whether to start at all. We spend 30 minutes covering:
If we can't define those clearly on the call, the project isn't ready to build. We'll tell you that on the call — not three weeks in when it's more expensive to fix.
If the scope is clear, we issue a written scope document within 24 hours. That document is the contract. Both parties sign it. The sprint starts the following Monday.
Day 1 through 7 is about reducing technical risk before any agent logic is written.
Infrastructure provisioning. We stand up the execution environment — container, serverless function, or cloud VM depending on your requirements. We configure logging, monitoring, and alerting from day one. Agents that go to production without observability cause incidents nobody can debug.
Integration authentication. Every integration point gets authenticated and tested independently: API keys retrieved, OAuth flows completed, webhook endpoints verified. We don't write agent logic against integrations we haven't confirmed work. This sounds obvious, but integration failures discovered in week 3 are the most common cause of sprint delays.
Data pipeline verification. If the agent processes structured data (CRM records, database rows, email contents), we verify the data format, quality, and edge cases against real examples. Agents built on assumed data formats break on real data.
End of week 1: All integration points are confirmed. The execution environment is running. We've verified the happy path data flow end-to-end with manual test inputs.
Week 2 is the build. With infrastructure stable and integrations confirmed, we write the agent logic against known-good inputs and outputs.
Prompt engineering and model selection. We select the appropriate model for the task based on latency requirements, cost constraints, and accuracy needs. A classification agent doesn't need the same model as a document synthesis agent. We prompt-engineer against real examples from your workflow, not synthetic data.
Workflow orchestration. Multi-step workflows require orchestration logic: what triggers each step, how outputs feed into subsequent steps, how the agent recovers from partial failures. We build this with explicit state tracking — no implicit sequencing that's impossible to debug.
First end-to-end test. By end of week 2, the agent runs end-to-end on a set of representative real inputs and produces outputs your team can review. The outputs won't be perfect. They're not supposed to be — that's what week 3 is for.
Week 3 is where the agent gets hardened against the real workflow.
Test suite construction. We build a test suite with 20–50 representative inputs covering the happy path, edge cases, and known failure modes. The test suite runs automatically on every code change. It's a deliverable — you own it after the sprint.
Edge case handling. Real workflows have exceptions: inputs that arrive in unexpected formats, systems that return errors, time-sensitive steps that might fail and need retry logic. Week 3 is when we discover these — and build the handling logic for each one.
Performance and cost profiling. We measure latency on real inputs and calculate per-execution cost at your expected volume. If the economics don't work at scale, we know it now and can adjust the model or caching strategy before deployment.
Your team reviews. By end of week 3, we present a working demo to your stakeholders. You run test cases. You find the things we missed. This is intentional — your domain knowledge surfaces edge cases we couldn't have anticipated.
Week 4 is about getting the agent into your production environment and ensuring your team can run it without us.
Production deployment. We deploy to your environment — not ours. The agent runs on your infrastructure, under your access controls, in your security perimeter. We do not host production agents on behalf of clients.
Runbook documentation. Every deployment gets a runbook: how to monitor the agent, what the alerts mean, how to handle the three most common failure modes, and how to update the prompts if the workflow changes. Written for your team, not for us.
Handoff call. We walk your designated owner through the deployed agent, the monitoring setup, and the runbook. This call is recorded. Questions get answered. Escalation paths are agreed.
90-day support begins. After handoff, we're available for tuning, debugging, and edge cases that emerge in production. We expect to hear from you in the first two weeks as volume ramps up. After that, most clients don't need us again — which is the point.
Thirty days is tight. It requires your team to make decisions quickly when we bring tradeoffs to them. It requires access to integration credentials within 48 hours of kickoff, not two weeks. It requires a single decision-maker who can approve the week 3 demo without a committee review.
The pace isn't punishing — it's clarifying. When there's only 30 days, every decision has a clear priority. The things that matter get done. The things that don't get deferred to the 90-day support period.
Most clients tell us after the sprint that they accomplished more in 30 days than they expected to accomplish in a quarter. That's not because we're faster — it's because the constraint removes the optionality that was making everything take longer.
Ready to run a sprint? Book a 30-minute scoping call and we'll tell you whether your workflow qualifies and what the sprint would cost.