The pressure to show something is enormous, and it arrives before anyone knows what the something should be. A studio that gives in produces a beautiful artefact pointed in the wrong direction, and then spends the rest of the engagement defending it.
So our first week produces almost nothing you could put in a deck. It produces the reason for everything that follows.
Read everything first
Support tickets, sales calls, the analytics nobody opens, the internal doc where someone already worked out the answer two years ago. Most projects are not short of ideas; they are short of somebody who has read the whole file.
Show the thinking, not the pixels
The first review is a written argument with reference imagery, not a comp. It is easier to disagree with a sentence than with something that looks finished — and disagreement in week one is free.
Then move quickly
The slow week buys speed everywhere else. When the direction is genuinely settled, work stops being negotiation and starts being craft, and craft is the part we are fast at.
