Six people, three months of prototypes, nothing in production.
A small B2B SaaS team using AI tools every day, individually. No shared workflow. Every prototype lived on the author’s laptop. Vector engagement: multi-user git, review gates, CI with automated tests, and per-domain agent roles.
Situation
Six people, mixed backgrounds — one person who could ship to production confidently, four who were strong domain operators with active AI-assisted IDEs, and a designer running their own prototypes. Output was high. Nothing was integrated. The one engineer was the bottleneck for everything that touched production, and the other five had no path to add work without going through them.
The honest version of the problem: their workflow worked fine when one person was building. It quietly broke as soon as a second person joined.
What we installed
A Vector engagement. Multi-user git workflow with feature branches and pull requests; review gates that combined an AI reviewer pass with a human sign-off; CI that ran their automated tests on every change; staging and production environments isolated per service; and per-domain agent roles, so the planner agent for billing knew the constraints of billing without us hand-holding it every time.
Two live training sessions, six weeks apart. The first was during the build week, walking everyone through the loop on a real first feature. The second came after they’d been running it for a month — by then the questions were sharper, more specific, and the session was useful in a way it couldn’t have been on day one.
Results
- Three customer-facing features shipped in the first month after handover — more than the previous quarter combined
- 100% of changes went through review gates and CI; the “oh I just pushed this directly” pattern stopped
- The lone engineer became a reviewer and architect, not a bottleneck
- 60-day support window used for one CI configuration question and one rollback rehearsal
Builder’s insight
The friction wasn’t technical, it was political. Asking a designer who’d been shipping prototypes for months to put their changes through a review gate felt, at first, like a downgrade. We addressed it head-on in week two: the gate is what lets their work reach customers without an engineer translating it. Once that landed, the rest of the workflow stopped feeling like overhead and started feeling like the thing that made shipping possible.
Team big enough to slow itself down?
A Vector engagement is for teams of 2–8 who need a real shared workflow, not just better individual tools.
or email us at alex@norai.com.au