Marcela Cevallos, engagement manager at Kin Analytics, believes the best solutions come from sitting inside a client’s operation. Her forward deployment approach involves embedding with teams day to day to understand how work happens. On a recent engagement, she spent a week on-site with a collections team, mapping their processes end to end to identify where friction was costing them the most.

“It’s exceptional when the relationship stops being a project and becomes a partnership,” Cevallos says. “That level of trust comes from being close enough to the work to understand their business the way they do.”

Cevallos measures success through natural adoption, tracking whether end users rely on what she builds, not simply whether it was delivered. She also holds engagements to the outcomes agreed on at the start, continuing to measure results long after go-live.