We describe our process in five words — understand, research, design, build, evolve — because that’s genuinely the order problems get solved in, not because it makes a tidy diagram.
Understand means resisting the urge to start with a solution. Most of the times a project has gone sideways for us, it’s because we jumped to "let’s use a model for this" before we’d actually pinned down what was broken.
Research and design happen together more than the list suggests. The right architecture and the right interface tend to inform each other; designing one without the other usually means redoing both.
Build happens in increments with something working at every stage, not one long sprint toward a single reveal. And evolve is the step people skip — treating launch as the finish line instead of the point where you actually start learning whether the thing works.