From “a month per task” to predictable delivery
Early-stage marketplace, Europe
5 hours a week for 4 months, 2026. Client name withheld.
- From request to live
- Before:
up to a monththen6–9 daysNow:1–2 daysSecond version, with my AI orchestration - Change waiting for review
- Before:
about 4 daysthenabout 2 daysNow:same daySecond version: AI review in the pipeline
Where it started
Three developers. The first version of the product, agreed at four months, took a year. There was no shared tracker, single tasks took up to a month, and nobody measured it.
The founder is not technical and was the last person to find out where the project stood.
What I did
- One tracker and a working process around it; moved the team onto it and built a knowledge base.
- A sync rhythm three times a week, so the founder sees the state of the project without asking.
- Delivery speed as a team health metric — it had never been counted before.
- Onboarded two new developers into the process instead of around it.
- AI in the daily routine: coding assistants and automated code review, and training the team to actually use them.
What changed
- A task reaches production in 6–9 days instead of up to a month (founder’s estimate).
- Code review takes about two days instead of four.
- How much depends on any one person, and the load on each, is visible in numbers.
- The lead developer stopped doing by hand what AI tooling now does.
- Architectural problems were diagnosed in month four instead of “much later”.
- The second version, built by my delivery team with AI orchestration: a task reaches production in 1–2 days, and code review happens the same day.
After the handover
The process runs without my daily involvement. The team still uses every practice — that is the point of the work.
“The broken telephone is gone — the one we had when I didn’t know what was happening with the project at all. Now I understand.”
“On my own I would have reached these real problems in the architecture and the code much later. I might have spent more and gone bust along the way.”
“You helped organise the team and its processes, and brought new technology into our project. I would recommend you to anyone: you can see right away that you know your stuff, that you have a lot of experience, and that you will help improve the project — not only the team, the founder too.”
The founder, in an interview. Translated from Russian.
Stack: YouTrack, CodeRabbit, Node.js, React, MongoDB
Is your project somewhere similar?
Thirty minutes, free, no pitch.
