Planning and communication cadence
How often you hear from me, what the recurring sessions are for, and the difference between synchronous cadence and async availability.
Cadence by engagement
| Engagement | Recurring session | Between sessions |
|---|---|---|
| Advisor | Advisory time, four hours a month, scheduled to suit | Async support |
| Builder Core | Weekly planning | Async support, standard priority |
| Builder Plus | Twice-weekly sync | Async, high priority |
| Builder Max | Daily availability | Async, top priority |
| Productized service | Kickoff, then delivery of the written output | Questions answered as they arise |
| Custom project | Per milestone | Async |
Two different things are being sold in the Builder column, and they are worth separating.
The recurring session is a planning session. It sets or corrects the cycle plan. It is not a status meeting, because status should be visible without a meeting.
Priority and availability are what actually differ most between tiers. Standard priority means your question gets answered in the normal flow of the week. Top priority means it interrupts.
Async first
Most of the work happens outside the calls, and most of the communication should too. The default is written: a decision made in writing can be looked up in three months, a decision made on a call cannot.
Practically that means the plan, the trade-offs and the reasons live in whatever tracker or document you already use. I do not impose a tool on you.
Visibility between sessions
You should never have to ask what state the work is in. What that looks like depends on the engagement, but the constant is that work lands continuously rather than appearing in one drop at the end of the month. For code engagements that means the branch, the pull requests and the review comments are yours to read at any point, not a snapshot delivered later.
Response times
There is no contractual response-time SLA on any tier, and I would rather say so plainly than publish a number I would then have to defend on a Sunday. What the tiers buy is relative priority, and in practice that means:
- Anything that blocks your team gets picked up first, on every tier.
- Higher tiers get interrupted for; lower tiers get answered in the normal flow of the day.
- If I am going to be genuinely unavailable for a stretch, you hear about it before it happens, not after.
If you need a contractual SLA with penalties attached, say so during scoping. It is a reasonable thing to want and it belongs in the agreement rather than on a web page.
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