What a Review actually looks like when it lands.
Names changed. Structure didn't. This is a composite of a real engagement — the intake, the week of diagnostic work, the deliverable that got handed back. Here so you can see the shape of the thing before you commit to it.
The six questions, submitted at 10:47pm.
Six short questions, nine axes captured. Growth goal, the wall, what you've tried, autonomy to act, decision readiness. Twenty-two minutes at most. The first sentence a founder writes is almost always the diagnosis.
A founder we'll call M. runs a Series-B software company. Growth flattened two quarters ago. The team's been working harder, not slower, and the dashboards keep saying the same thing three different ways. She fills out the intake on a Monday night after the kids are asleep. Nine axes captured. Twenty-two minutes.
What she writes in Q4 — the friction in plain language — is the line that decides the week: "We keep running plays that used to convert, and something downstream is silently eating them."
The first sentence she wrote was the diagnosis. She didn't know it yet. Most founders don't. The questions are built to surface that sentence before the work starts.
The vector signature the intake produced.
CS-20260420-224706-0812A one-page read-back, sent before any work begins.
A one-page note before any work begins: here's what we heard, here's the pattern we think you're in, here are the two things we're not going to look at. You redirect it now, or we start the clock.
Tuesday morning she gets a one-page read-back. Not a proposal. Not a pitch deck. A page that says: here is what we heard you say, here is the pattern we think you're sitting inside, here are the two things we are not going to look at (because they are noise), and here is what we will hand you on Friday.
This is the meeting-point calibration. If she wants to redirect it before the clock starts, now is when. If she wants to add signal we missed, now is when.
Working hypothesis
Pattern match: P02 · Channel Saturation Denied and a probable tail of P08 · Attribution Drift. We're treating the "plays don't convert anymore" signal as downstream noise and looking upstream at what the channel taught the market to ignore.
- In scope: paid acquisition, lifecycle email, one cohort of sales activity.
- Out of scope: pricing, org design, product roadmap. Noise this week.
- Deliverable: a Clarity Review handed back Friday, 2pm. One page of diagnosis, one page of instrumentation, three moves already drafted.
Three days of quiet work we don't stream.
The diagnostic passes. Public-signal pulls. Pattern-library match and disconfirm. The three moves drafted. One short confirming message midweek — not a status call, just a "the hypothesis is holding" line with one contrarian signal attached.
We don't do status calls during the work. We do the work. M. gets a single short message Wednesday afternoon — a confirming line that says the hypothesis is holding, and one contrarian signal we found that pushes it harder than she expected.
Between Tuesday and Thursday we run the diagnostic passes, pull the public signals, check the pattern library for confirming and disconfirming evidence, and draft the three moves. By Thursday night everything is written. Friday morning is polish.
What actually gets delivered.
Five artifacts: one page of diagnosis, one page of instrumentation, three moves drafted (not described), an explicit who-handles-what split, a traceable signal table. Everything Monday-morning deployable.
Friday at 2pm she gets an engagement folder. Not a PDF attached to an email. A folder, with a short index page, and inside it everything she needs to act on Monday without calling us.
What she does with it on Monday.
Three people inside her company argue with the diagnosis for two days. The pattern holds. Move 1 deploys the following Tuesday. Move 2 three weeks later. Move 3 they decide not to run — and they're right. The relationship from that point is optional.
M. forwards the engagement folder to three people inside the company. One of them argues with the diagnosis for two days — which is the point. The pattern holds up under the argument. The team deploys the first of the three moves the following Tuesday. They deploy the second three weeks later. The third one they decide not to run, and they are right not to run it — the signal moved in the meantime.
The relationship from that point on is optional. Most clients take the artifacts and run. A few come back six weeks later with a second question. A smaller number build a longer relationship. None of that is assumed on Friday.
What she keeps
- The diagnosis, written.
- The three drafted moves.
- The instrumentation, with caveats.
- The signal table, traceable.
- The pattern name, to recognize it next time.
What she doesn't get
- A standing retainer she didn't ask for.
- A follow-on deck.
- A project plan for the next twelve months.
- A recommendation we can't draft in the week.
- A seat at the Monday meeting.
The shape of the week, compressed.
Five business days. Monday intake, Tuesday read-back, Tue–Thu quiet work, Friday 2pm delivery. That's the shape. It's designed to respect your time and leave you with artifacts that outlive the engagement.
Monday: six questions. Tuesday: one-page read-back. Tuesday through Thursday: the quiet work. Friday 2pm: the folder lands. The week after: three people argue with it, the first move deploys, the team keeps going.
That's the shape. It's designed to respect your time, give you something you can act on without another meeting, and leave you with artifacts that outlive the engagement. If that's what you need next, the intake is six questions and takes twenty-two minutes. Start there.
The Review is one week. The work inside it is the compressed output of years. The seal is the vouch — everything Selligence hands you, Selligence stands behind.