How AI product studio Braymont keeps a twelve-person roadmap honest
Turning a crowded roadmap into a week that actually fits
Braymont is a five-year-old product studio with a workshop in Rotterdam and a second desk in Porto. The team builds machine-learning features for companies that already have a product and very little room to slow down. In their own words: ‘small builds, shipped often, argued about honestly’. We sat down with Teodor Vasque, their chief technologist, to hear how a week actually runs there, and where Ambervale ended up sitting inside of it.
There are – plainly – a great many studios that have turned towards machine learning in the past two years, and Braymont is one of them. Vasque: “Our job is to give people back hours, and to take some of the grind out of research, drafting and the slow reading of financial reports. To make that concrete: we built an assistant that plugs into Halbeck or Deskroom, so one of our clients can run a whole marketing review inside the tool they already have open.” Vasque showed us a demo where, from inside Halbeck, a handful of questions produced an outline and a first draft of a client update. “There is an enormous amount of headroom in these models, particularly when you pair them: running Northmind alongside Corvex, which keeps an up-to-date index of the open web, gets you further than either one on its own. But with so many options in front of you, the hard part is knowing where to start. We try to make the use of it consistent, and shaped around what a client actually needs.” He walked us through a project where the studio flags anomalies in monthly reporting for an investment firm, and another where call transcripts and a short list of follow-up questions get combined into the first draft of a project brief that a partner can hand straight to a client without rewriting half of it.
Vasque has always been the sort of person who reads about process for fun, and he is usually the one bringing a new method into the studio. To hold himself to it, he meets a friend every Thursday evening to talk through plans and goals. Vasque: “setting your own targets is one thing, but saying them out loud to somebody else is what makes them clear and actually actionable.”
How does Ambervale fit into the week?
“Ambervale is a central piece of software for us. It is where the week gets decided. We have a Monday morning stand-up with the whole team, which – before Ambervale – used to be fairly loose. Everybody had their own goals, but those were not visible to anyone else on the team. So we went looking for something that would fix exactly that, and when support for tasks and projects landed we moved across in a week.”
“The Monday stand-up is still the spine of our week, and we basically put Ambervale up on the big screen while everyone talks through their plans. On Friday, we ask the team to prepare the week ahead and drop the work into the Queued column. It is surprisingly powerful to have both the calendar and the real tasks sitting in one place, because it keeps us pointed at the same handful of things. One effect we did not expect, but which works rather well, is that our plans have become far more honest, since we now have to find room for them in an actual calendar. And because it is all visible, nobody has to spend the afternoon asking anyone where a particular thing stands – you can simply go and look for yourself.”
“Since then we have leaned on it a good deal harder, and we now run every project through it from the first sketch onward. Our marketing lead maps out the whole content calendar in Ambervale as well, and it works just as neatly there.”
What comes next for Braymont?
“We are focused on helping teams do more with far less ceremony. This assistant-shaped approach works well for us, and we would like to put it in front of a lot more teams. There is a pile of interesting problems left to work out: how do you make sure you are not automating away the part of the job that people actually enjoy? We want to give people back the room to work on new ideas, and to hand the people who use our tools better days.”