Picton Mahoney's team signed in to an engine built for it alone 17 days after its first commit

The judgement was the job. The looking was the cost.

Picton Mahoney is an employee-owned asset manager. The work in question is the kind that every firm like it does and almost none of it enjoys: find the organisations worth a conversation, work out which ones are actually worth a conversation, and then have the conversation.

The first two of those are not judgement. They are hours. Someone opens a browser, reads, decides, writes a row in a spreadsheet, and does it again. The judgement that the firm is actually paying for arrives at the end, after the part that anyone could do.

And because the looking lived in a browser and a spreadsheet, the deciding did not survive. A firm that had been considered and passed over in March looked exactly like a firm nobody had ever opened, in June.

An engine in its own repository, and a place to argue with it

Two things, in two repositories, for two different reasons.

The engine is not a fork of our platform. It has its own repository and its own release history, because what it does is specific to one firm and grafting it into a product every other client rides would have been the wrong shape. It runs discovery, enrichment and scoring as one pipeline, and it writes what it finds somewhere a person can look at it.

The portal is a fork of the platform, and the routes written into it exist in no other client's copy and not in the platform itself. We know which, because we diffed this repository against the platform and against every other client rather than guessing.

They are almost all one idea: a queue, and everything a person needs to make a decision in it and have that decision stick. Pending, approved, rejected, and needs more information. A score with the reasoning behind it, so the number can be argued with rather than obeyed. Sort and filter, because a queue you cannot re-order is a list. Decisions in bulk, because reviewing a thousand things one at a time is not review, it is data entry. And an export, so an approved row leaves the portal and arrives in the system the team already works in.

The engine proposes. A person disposes.

Nothing the engine finds is treated as a conclusion. A run produces candidates and a score, and the score carries its reasoning, and both of those sit in a queue until a human being agrees or does not.

That ordering is deliberate and it is the whole design. An engine that decided would be wrong in ways nobody could see. An engine that proposes is wrong in ways that show up in a review queue, get rejected with a note, and change what the next run does.

We also took things out. The platform ships a new-user setup flow, a welcome modal and a product tour, all of which are useful for a company meeting the product for the first time and none of which belong in front of a team who were handed a tool and told to use it. They were suppressed in three separate layers. The education section came out of the navigation entirely. The workflows page leads with the engine rather than with a generic example.

The build, and the part that has not worked yet

111

One hundred and eleven commits on an engine repository that is not a fork of anything. Thirty-one pull requests merged into the portal. A ten-page branded guide and a help centre inside the product. Seventeen days from the engine's first commit to the first sign-in from the firm, and about six weeks to its first milestone going live.

And one of five invited people signed in during the 30 days to 20 August.

We are printing that second number next to the first ones because leaving it out would make this page a lie of omission. Every deliverable was accepted. The engine runs. The people it was built for are not using it. That is a delivery failure and it is ours, not theirs, and the fix for it is not more code.

If you want the version of this story with a measured outcome at the end of it, read the knowledge brain case: eight of ten people used that one in its first month. If you want to know how we would approach a build like this one, the audit emails a plan inside five minutes, with the arithmetic attached.