What the ninety-day review found

Process

18 Mar 2026

9 min read

We call every client ninety days after launch and ask what has broken. This spring we read four years of those conversations back in one sitting, and the pattern was not flattering.

It is a short, deliberately awkward call, and we have now had forty-one of them. The question is not whether they are happy. It is what has gone wrong since we left.

Read one at a time they look like small operational complaints. Read together they are a description of something we were not designing.

Almost nothing that came back was about the design. Two mentions of a colour, one about a photograph. The rest were operational, and they clustered tightly enough to sort.

In order of frequency:

Every one of those is a handover problem wearing a design problem’s clothes.

The work was fine. The conditions we handed it into were the thing we had not designed.

Review summary, spring 2026

The clearest example: a case-study template used forty-three times, eleven of which were not case studies. A recruitment page, two product pages and an annual report had all been pushed through it, because it was the only layout that looked finished.

Nobody did anything wrong. We had built one generous template and eight narrow ones, and under deadline people reach for the generous one. The fix was not more templates — it was making two of the narrow ones less precious.

We now ask, before handover, which template will be abused, and then design that one to survive being abused.

Pl. 02  Template audit, ninety-day review

Handover is a fortnight rather than a meeting, and it is scheduled and priced from the start. We sit with the people who will maintain the thing while they do real work in it, not while we demonstrate it.

We also stopped writing the maintenance document ourselves. The client’s own team writes it, we correct it, and the corrections tell us precisely which parts of the system are illegible.

Run the review at thirty days as well. Ninety is late enough that the workarounds have set, and by then people describe them as how the system works rather than as something that went wrong.