Discovery
Find the work worth changing.
We sit with the people who drive revenue and the people who carry cost. Not a top ten executive list. Not a survey. Department by department, workflow by workflow, until we can see the business the way the people inside it see it. Then we rank what we found, and we start building.
The founder interview comes first
We start with the person who owns the outcome. One conversation, founder or CXO, no agenda but the business itself. Where revenue actually comes from. What the cost structure looks like, line by line. Where the founder's own time goes every week. That conversation sets the map. Every interview after it gets checked against what we heard here.
- Revenue units, and how each one gets made
- Cost structure, line by line
- Where the founder's own time actually goes
Then every department, over about two weeks
From there we go wide. One knowledgeable person per department, marketing, B2B, post-sale, CRM, tech, each sitting at a different distance from revenue. Fifteen to twenty interviews, about two weeks. Nobody fills out a form. Everybody talks to us directly, about their own work, in their own words.
We map the workflow, not the org chart
For every department, we go one level below the job title. What tools this person actually uses. Which steps are manual, which are already automated. How much time each workflow costs, every week. How close that workflow sits to revenue or cost. That last question matters most. A slow workflow next to revenue is worth more to fix than a slow workflow three steps removed from it.
Rank on time and revenue, not on who complained loudest
Every workflow we find gets placed on two axes: how much time it costs, and how close it sits to revenue or cost. The problems that score high on both get built first. This is the point of discovery. Not a long list of everything that is broken. A short, ranked list of what to fix first, and the reasoning for why.
Illustrative. Every engagement produces its own map, from its own interviews.
A bounty board and a hackathon, running underneath everything else
Interviews are a two week snapshot. Problems keep showing up after we leave. So we set up two things that keep surfacing them. One runs every day. The other runs a few times a year and forces out what the day to day misses.
The bounty board
Keep surfacing problems after the interviews end · runs every day
Employees submit daily problems as bounties. Others pick them up and solve them. A manager approves. A small perk rewards it. The result is a live, validated database of real problems, built by the people doing the work.
The hackathon
Force out problems the interviews missed · a few times a year
Outcome-based hackathons surface issues nobody thought to mention, in ops, in merchandising, in supply chain, wherever the team points it. It is a fast way to test whether the discovery map is actually complete.
The difference
Not a report. The start of a build.
A consultant
Interviews ten to twenty executives. Runs a survey for everyone else. Hands over a deck, in about the same two weeks this whole discovery phase takes.
Celeco
- Interviews reach the people doing the work, not just the executives above them
- Discovery ends in a working system, not a slide deck
- We embed in existing workflows instead of introducing new tools
- We show a live demo on the business's own problem before the build starts
- We stay through deployment and governance
There is no shelf for recommendations to sit on, because there is no report. There is a system that runs.
Fifteen to twenty conversations. About two weeks. One ranked list at the end.