Process
Working with three engineers on the other side of the world.
The offshore objection is legitimate. This page answers it in specifics — overlap hours, who you talk to, who owns the code, and what happens if we go quiet.
Phases
Four phases, with honest durations
- 011–2 weeks
Discovery
Scope, constraints, and the written definition of done. Ends with a fixed price and a date, or an honest statement that we are the wrong fit.
- 024–12 weeks
Build
Weekly shipped increments on a real URL. Your repo, your cloud, from the first commit. Written updates you read rather than meetings you attend.
- 031 week
Handover
Documentation, architecture notes, a recorded walkthrough, and access confirmed. Written for the engineer who joins after us.
- 0430–90 days
Support window
Defined response times in writing. After that, either your team owns it or we move to a retainer — both are normal.
Communication
Communication
The specifics, because this is the part the objection is actually about.
- Overlap, US Eastern
- 9am – 1pm ET, every working day
- Overlap, UK and EU
- 2pm – 6pm GMT, every working day
- Who you talk to
- The engineer writing the code, by name
- Written update
- Every Friday, whether or not anything went wrong
- Response time, working hours
- Within 2 hours
- Response time, outside
- Next working morning
- Escalation
- Direct phone number for all three of us
- Tools
- Your Slack or ours, your tracker, your repo
Legal
Legal and ownership
All of this is in the contract, not just on this page.
- IP assignment signed before any code is written. Everything produced is yours outright.
- Mutual NDA as standard, or yours if you prefer it.
- Code lands in your GitHub organisation from the first commit. Never ours, never mirrored.
- Infrastructure runs in your cloud account, under your billing.
- No licence-back clauses, no shared ownership, no portfolio rights without written permission.
- If the engagement ends early, for any reason, you keep everything and we write the handover note anyway.
Your side
What we need from you
Expectations in both directions. Most delays on projects this size are not engineering delays.
- One decision maker who can say yes without a committee.
- Access on day one: repo, cloud, the third-party accounts we will need.
- Review turnaround within two working days on anything blocking.
- Somebody who knows the domain available for questions during overlap hours.
- Honesty about deadlines that are real versus deadlines that are aspirational.