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Field notebook // case studies & useful failures
Anonymised client case studies and the engineering behind them — how each brief started, what we found, what we built, and what actually changed. Names and numbers withheld; the method is the point.
A university research group Research · Data
A research group had brilliant data trapped in forty confusing tables. We turned the export into something a newcomer could understand by lunchtime.
A 40-table export became one documented, queryable API; onboarding a new researcher went from days to an afternoon
A B2B SaaS support team SaaS · Applied AI
A support team wanted AI to answer tickets. The valuable part was teaching it when to refuse and hand a human the wheel.
Routine tickets resolved automatically behind a hard human-handoff rule; no confidently-wrong answers shipped to customers
A European logistics operator Logistics
An operations dashboard was so slow that staff kept a spreadsheet instead. We made the real thing faster than the workaround.
p95 first-meaningful-load fell from ~9s to under a second; the "is it broken?" emails stopped
A UK consumer-payments startup Fintech
A payments startup was losing people at sign-up. We rebuilt onboarding around the one thing the user actually came to do.
Onboarding completion climbed and the "stuck at verification" tickets dropped to a trickle