The Inspect Methodology
Practices for building
A verdict is only worth as much as the discipline behind it. These are the practices that govern every inspection, published so you can hold us to them.
The standard exists before the work does
Most teams decide what good means after the launch, in a retro, with the evidence already cold. Write the bar down first and it stops being taste. It becomes something a team can plan against and hit on purpose.
Our standard is published before you ever submit. Nine dimensions, the same anchor language for every product, applied against the stage you are actually at and not against a company with ten times your funding. No inspector moves past a dimension until the verdict can be defended against that language.
Evidence, or it did not happen
Opinion is the cheapest thing in software. Everyone has a view on your onboarding, and none of them cost anything to hold. The difference between critique and noise is whether someone else can go and check it.
Every finding carries its source. A timestamp in the recording, a measurement from a scan, a screenshot of the moment it broke. "At 14:32 the paywall appears with no price on screen" is a finding. "Pricing transparency could improve" is not.
Someone puts their name on it
Anonymous judgment is easy to give and impossible to weigh. "The team felt" and "users say" cost nothing to write, which is why they are so often wrong and so rarely corrected.
Two named inspectors sign every verdict. Their names, their faces, and the products they have shipped sit on the review itself. Automation prepares the evidence. It never signs.
You cannot see your own product
Six months in, the confusing parts stop looking confusing. You know where the buttons are. You know what the empty state means. That knowledge builds products and ruins judgment.
Two inspectors work your product independently and never compare notes until both are finished. Where they disagree, the gap is signal in itself. A first impression is the one thing your team can never have again.
A finding without a fix is a complaint
Anyone can list forty problems and call it rigor. The work is knowing which ones cost you money, in what order, and what your team does about it on Monday.
Every issue carries a severity and a one-sentence fix from the moment it is spoken on camera. The report reads as a sequence, not an inventory. Start at the top and keep going.
The users who leave quietly cost the most
Nobody files a ticket for a page that took nine seconds to load, or a form they could not reach with a keyboard. They just leave. The failures that never reach your inbox are the ones quietly capping your growth.
Performance, accessibility, security posture, and trust signals get measured on every inspection, whether or not you asked. Not as a compliance box. As the part of the product where users disappear without telling you.
Careful and slow are not the same thing
The traditional audit took six weeks because it was scheduled that way, not because judgment takes six weeks. Most of that time went to coordination, formatting, and waiting on a deck.
We took out the waiting, not the thinking. Experts make every judgment call. Everything around those calls is automated, which is why a verdict lands in 48 hours and the standard never moved to get there.
Colin & Gene, Founders