The gap this fills
Between the big pieces of work, a stream of decisions shows up that are too small for a project and too consequential to guess at.
A vendor is quoting a platform and the deck is very good. An internal team has built something on a weekend that is now in front of customers. A recruiter has sent a shortlist and nobody on the panel can tell whether the candidate is any good. The board wants a paper on AI risk by Thursday.
None of these justify a hire, and all of them benefit from someone senior who already has your context.
How it works in practice
A fortnightly working session with the sponsor and whoever else is relevant that month. An async channel for the things that cannot wait. And a standing agenda that we keep honest: what shipped, what stalled, what changed outside that should change our plan.
We keep a written record of the decisions and the reasoning. Six months in, that record is often the most useful artefact of the engagement, because it lets a new person understand what you decided and what you were weighing at the time.
What we will not do
We will not rubber stamp a plan we think is wrong to keep the retainer.
We will not recommend our own build work when a product does the job, and we will not pretend a build is simpler than it is to win it.
And we will not stay longer than we are useful. The intended end state of this relationship is that your team stops needing it.