For Startups
Let a small team change roles without dropping context.
Start with the responsibility in front of you. Keep the request, technical choices and implementation evidence openable as the team grows.
01
Small team, whole product
At a startup every engineer is half the stack and the whole product at once. Requirements live in a founder’s head, the design lives in whoever wrote the first version, and “done” means it demoed. AI made each person faster — and made it easier to ship code nobody planned, on a codebase nobody fully remembers.
02
Why “just move fast” stops working
Speed without a shared process compounds: the third engineer rewrites what the first one meant, the assistant follows whichever convention it saw last, and the fix for last week’s feature breaks this week’s. A bigger company would hire analysts, architects, and QA. A startup cannot — and adding meetings is the one thing that kills the pace you hired for.
03
Product engineers, not process
A founder can begin with BA to turn an uncertain request into accepted scope and the initial canonical WP. Architect enriches that same WP with the technical plan when needed; Developer implements a bounded change from the prepared handoff. Quality Harness can inspect the result. People can hold several roles over time without installing every harness at once.
04
How it works for a small team
- One question at a time — choose the role that owns the current decision.
- Shared package identity — BA creates the initial canonical WP; Architect preserves and enriches it.
- Explicit setup — if code lives in another repository, make the prepared package and referenced files available there before Developer starts.
- Reviewable result — record checks that ran, failed or were skipped, and request Quality review as needed. Git delivery remains a separate approval.
- Supported environments — follow the documented Claude Code CLI or Claude Desktop/local Runtime path for the chosen role.
05
The case
The Digital Winery case describes a product context where intent, operations, and production change need a linked delivery record. Public outcomes are omitted until publication evidence is approved.
Get moving
Choose the harness that fits the responsibility you hold today, or talk to us when the team needs a shared delivery flow.