Why we put a real two-week strategy sprint at the front of every engagement. What's in it. Why operators get more out of it than marketing leads do.
Most agency proposals tuck discovery into a page-one paragraph. "We'll begin with a kick-off call to align on goals." Two weeks later, design starts and discovery has effectively been a single Zoom.
We do this differently because we've watched the alternative go wrong too many times.
Our first two weeks are a real sprint. Three working sessions with the operator in the room. Not just the marketing lead. A competitor and category audit that goes past the obvious. A measurement audit (where's the data, where isn't it, what would we need to instrument to answer the strategic questions). A positioning artefact at the end: a written document, not a deck, that the team can actually use after we leave.
This sounds expensive until you compare it to the alternative. The alternative is six weeks of design and build executed against a brief nobody actually owned. An awkward conversation follows when the result doesn't move the metric. We've watched that happen at agencies we respect. The cost of getting strategy wrong is the entire project.
So discovery isn't the prelude to the work. It's the work. Production follows from it.
That's why we'd rather you came to us with a question. "We don't know how to position this." "We can't figure out why our checkout is leaking." Better than a finished brief. The brief is what we make together.