The gap between your strategy and the people it was built for is where large-scale services fail.
We conduct primary field research, synthesize what we find, and build the argument your leadership team needs to see the problem differently — before deciding what to do next.
Inside Google and Amazon at the scale of billions of users. Inside the White House and federal agencies at the scale of every American.
See how we work ↓Most organizations know more about their dashboards than about the people they're built to serve.
A product team spends six months building AI features. Adoption is four percent. In the next strategy session, the recommendation is to add more AI features. No one has spoken to a user in four months. The dashboard looks fine.
A government benefits program reaches sixty percent of its eligible population. The agency considers this a reasonable outcome. The forty percent who didn't find it live in the gap between how the program was designed and how their lives actually work.
What caused both of these wasn't technology. It was the slow drift between a very detailed internal map and the reality it was supposed to describe — the gap that opens when an organization stops going to the field to check whether its assumptions still hold.
This is the gap we work in.
A map is not a mirror. It is a set of choices about what to show and what to leave out.
Every strategy document, every executive dashboard, every product roadmap is a map. The quality of a map lives in the choices made about what to show and what to leave out — and what those choices make visible or invisible. They are design decisions, whether or not anyone recognizes them.
The field is what the map is drawn from. It is the person navigating a benefits portal at eleven o'clock at night. The enterprise customer who has adapted your product in a way you never anticipated. The behavioral shift that is one product cycle ahead of your trend reports. The field is irreducibly complex, and no map fully captures it.
The work lives in the gap between the two — taking what we find in the field and turning it into arguments clear enough to change what a leadership team believes, and what they decide to do next.
Four practices. Each one begins in the field and ends in a decision.
Strategic Landscape Mapping
We build a structured argument for where your strategic attention should go next — and why the current framing is causing you to miss it. The work draws on primary research, behavioral trends, competitive intelligence, and external forces to produce a single clear position your leadership team can act on.
Designed for leaders entering a new category, facing a disruption they can sense but not yet name, or sitting with a strategy that no longer holds the room the way it used to.
Human & Field Intelligence
We conduct primary qualitative research with the people your existing data does not represent well — underserved communities navigating government services, enterprise users who have adapted your product in unexpected ways, segments your existing research keeps getting wrong. We deliver a structured synthesis: a reframing of the problem that tells leadership what they need to hear — including what contradicts what they expected to find.
Designed for teams being driven by internal roadmaps rather than external reality, and organizations whose research function exists but whose findings are consistently overlooked.
Emerging Technology Positioning
We help organizations identify where AI and emerging technology genuinely serves human needs — and where it creates adoption failure, trust debt, or reputational risk. Every engagement starts from what people are trying to accomplish. The result is a clear position on where to build, where to wait, and where the technology is outrunning what people need from it.
Designed for technology companies under executive pressure to be "AI-first" without a clear strategy for where AI serves users, and public sector organizations receiving mandates to modernize.
Civic & Life Journey Redesign
We map complex multi-agency service journeys, identify the moments where citizens fall out of the system, and design interventions grounded in real life events — losing a job, transitioning from military service, surviving a disaster, navigating a housing crisis — rather than institutional program structures. We then develop strategic roadmaps sequenced for political and operational feasibility. This practice draws directly on our White House and federal agency work.
Designed for government agencies, civic nonprofits, community foundations, and philanthropies funding systems-level change.
How we structure engagements.
Engagements are sized to the decision, not to a standard package.
We serve as an embedded strategic advisor to an executive or senior leadership team — attending key decision points, reviewing strategy as it develops, bringing in what the field is showing that internal teams aren’t positioned to see, and offering the kind of direct read that people inside the organization typically won’t give. Typically 4–8 hours of direct engagement per month.
A contained engagement combining field research, trend synthesis, systems mapping, and strategic framing into a single coherent arc. Structured in three phases: discovery, field research, and synthesis — ending in a working session with the leadership team. Designed to answer the question that is driving the engagement and give leadership a clear position to move from — within a defined window and budget.
A facilitated session for a leadership team, designed to expose the gaps between what the organization believes and what is actually happening — and to produce decisions the team leaves the room prepared to act on. Built specifically for each client. Not templated.
One-on-one advisory for senior leaders navigating organizational pivots, career transitions, or strategic challenges that require honest peer-level counsel. From someone who has worked inside Google, Amazon, and the White House — and who will tell you what they actually see. Available as individual sessions or structured package engagements.
See a fit with what you're working on?
Start a conversation ↓Inside the institutions that shape how technology and government serve people at scale.
Google / Amazon Web Services
Strategic work on products used by billions. Inside the rooms where large-scale technology decisions get made, funded, defended, and sometimes quietly abandoned.
The White House / General Services Administration
Helped establish GSA’s Office of Customer Experience. Led the design and delivery of the first cross-agency customer experience program for veterans navigating the transition to civilian employment — a framework subsequently adopted as a federal pattern for other life journey redesigns.
500 Startups / Early Stage
Product and strategy work across startup ecosystems — advising 500 Startups on services connecting corporates, startups, and funders, and hands-on research, positioning, and product design for early-stage teams where resources are thin and every move has to count.
Products and services at global scale. Programs designed for every American. Engagement at the VP, director, and cabinet-agency level.
We do our best work when a leader needs to understand something they currently can't see — and is willing to act on what we find.
The organizations and leaders that reach out share one quality: they have run out of internal explanations for something that matters.
AI features that are not being adopted. A benefit program that is not reaching the people it was built for. A product strategy that felt sound eighteen months ago and now generates more internal debate than forward motion. A new leadership mandate with a short window to demonstrate impact and no established intelligence about where to begin.
We work with leaders in the public and civic sector — government agencies, civic nonprofits, philanthropies, advocacy organizations — and in the private sector — technology companies, startups, venture capital. What they share is not an industry. It is an honest appetite for understanding what they're missing.
If that describes where you are, the conversation below is the right place to start.
What is the most important thing you need to understand right now to make a better decision?
If what you've read here maps to something you're facing, write down what's going on and send it.
Every submission is read personally. If there is a fit, we will reach out to schedule a conversation.
No sales process. No obligation. No deck unless we decide together that one is useful.
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