West Product Development ← All services

Discovery Audit · Start here · 1–2 weeks

What a discovery audit produces

Before anyone writes code, somebody has to walk the whole company and find where the time actually goes. This is the shape of that work, taken from a real engagement with a solar installer and stripped of anything identifying.

Anonymized sample. The company name, the people, the dollar figures, and the specific findings have been removed or generalized. What’s shown is the method and the deliverable set.
16people interviewed
14interview sessions
9departments covered
41projects scoped & priced
13written deliverables

Method

How it runs

1

Interview everyone

CEO down to the coordinators. Sales, design, project management, construction, service, procurement, finance, admin, IT. Each person walks through their actual day and names what slows them down.

2

Map the stack and the handoffs

Every tool in use, what it costs, who touches it, and what happens in the gaps between departments. The breakages are almost never inside a department. They’re at the seams.

3

Rank it, then build

Each fix gets scoped, priced, and sorted by whether it grows revenue or cuts cost. Then the build starts, connecting what already exists or writing new software where nothing fits.

Deliverables

What gets handed over

Cross-Interview SynthesisEvery theme that came up more than once, with who said it
How We’d Actually Build ThisArchitecture and approach for each project
Three Ways to Build ItCustom software vs connecting what you already own
Should You Replace Any of Your Software?Tool-by-tool verdict with real costs
Quick Operational WinsFixes that need no software at all
Where the Value Is, RankedRevenue growth vs cost savings, side by side
Measuring the ImpactBaselines to judge the work against later
What Each Person Would Want BuiltA menu, separate from the priorities
AI Safety & Data GovernanceWorking draft for your internal committee
Safe Ways to Use AIPlain-language guardrails and a pre-flight check
Twice the Work, Same TeamWhat this actually changes for the people here
Board-ready deckThe whole audit in 14 slides

Findings

The kind of thing it turns up

Paying twice

A capacity planning tool already included in a subscription they were paying for, unused, while the same job was being done by hand in a spreadsheet.

Orphaned handoff

The handoff from construction to service had no owner. Everyone assumed the other department picked it up.

Re-entry

The same job data typed into three systems by three different people, because none of the systems talk to each other.

Overlap

Two paid tools doing substantially the same job, kept because different departments adopted them separately and nobody compared them.

Curious what yours would turn up?

An audit runs one to two weeks and ends with a written deliverable set you own, whether or not you build anything with us afterward.