Senior practitioners only — what that actually means

We say that a senior practitioner leads every project. The phrase is easy to write on a website, so it is fair to ask what we mean by it.

Seniority is judgment, not years

Years of experience are a rough proxy. What we are actually looking for is judgment when the situation is unclear: knowing which problems are worth solving properly and which are fine to solve quickly, and being able to explain the difference to a client.

A less experienced engineer and a senior one will often write similar code for a well-defined task. The difference shows up earlier, in the questions asked before any code is written, and later, in what happens when something unexpected breaks.

What it looks like on a project

• The person scoping your project is the person leading it. There is no handoff from a sales team to a delivery team.
• They are on every call. You do not get a senior name on the proposal and someone else in the meetings.
• They say no. Part of the job is telling a client that a feature is not worth its cost, or that the deadline and the scope cannot both be kept.
• They write things down. Decisions, trade-offs, and architecture are documented, so the project does not depend on one person’s memory.

Where junior people fit

We do work with people earlier in their careers. They pair with a senior lead on real deliverables and their work is reviewed before it ships. What we do not do is leave a junior person alone on a client project and call it senior-led.

Why it matters to you

Most of the cost of a project is decided in its first few weeks, by the choices made about scope and architecture. Those are the weeks when experience matters most, and they are the weeks when many agencies have their most experienced people busy selling the next project.