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The Greenbox Story · Finding the Fit
Assumption Mapping: Testing What You Believe
The team lists everything they believe but haven't validated, ranks by risk, and discovers that their most confident assumption is the one most likely to be wrong.
Read articleExam Room · AIF-C01
From Raw Model to Production Endpoint
A product team wants a chatbot that summarises support tickets. They have the tickets, a cloud account, and no ML background. Somebody says 'use a foundation model'. Between that sentence and a working endpoint sit roughly seven distinct stages, each with its own AWS service and its own decisions. The interesting question isn't which model to use -- it's which stages this team can skip, which they absolutely cannot, and what AWS gives them at each step.
Read articleUnder the Hood · The AI Field Guide
The Reranker You Didn't Know You Needed
RAG explanations stop at 'embed the query, look up the nearest documents, hand them to the LLM.' That's the demo. In production, there's a second pass between the lookup and the LLM, and it's the one that actually makes retrieval work.
Read articleKitchen and Craft
The Knife in My Hand
A sharp knife is safer than a dull one. Pick the right tool for the job, then put in the practice. Speed comes from practice, not pressure. A few focussed, well-maintained, well-practised tools will more predictably take you further than the latest beautiful shiny offering.
Read articleUnder the Hood · Time
Time Is Broken
Time doesn't flow at the same rate everywhere. It slows near massive objects, dilates at high speeds, and might not 'flow' at all. From GPS corrections to black holes, the physics that makes time truly strange.
Read articleExam Room · AIF-C01
Buy, Borrow, Build
A product manager with no ML background has been told to add AI to a SaaS product, and has heard of Bedrock, SageMaker, Comprehend, Translate, Textract, Rekognition. AWS has three different shapes of AI offering, and the shortest path depends entirely on whether a ready-made service already does the job.
Read articleThe Greenbox Story · Finding the Fit
Jobs to Be Done: Why Subscribers Actually Stay
Greenbox discovers that subscribers don't stay for fresh vegetables — they stay because they don't have to think about dinner on Tuesday.
Read articleExam Room · SAA-C03
The Archive Nobody Reads
Some data exists for compliance, not for use. Tens of terabytes of records sitting untouched until an auditor wants them. S3 has eight storage classes; only one of them is built for that pattern, and getting it wrong can cost an order of magnitude in a year you weren't paying attention to the bill.
Read articleUnder the Hood · The AI Field Guide
The Other Transformers
BERT and T5 are transformers too, but they aren't trying to be ChatGPT. They're trying to be the boring layer underneath -- classifiers, embeddings, structured transformations -- and they're often a better answer than an LLM.
Read articleThe Workshop
The Workshop: User Story Mapping
A pattern for laying out the whole user experience as a left-to-right narrative and then slicing it into releases, so the team can see both the shape of the thing they're building and the thinnest honest version they can ship first.
Read articleUnder the Hood · Time
Ticks or Tocks?
A second used to be a fraction of the day. Now it's defined by the vibrations of a caesium atom -- and even that might not be precise enough. From quartz watches to optical lattice clocks, the story of how we learned to count time.
Read articleExam Room · SAA-C03
The Closest Healthy Region
A multi-region application needs to route requests to the closest healthy region, failing over automatically when the preferred one drops out -- with no client-side retries and no extra health-check plumbing to maintain. Route 53 can do all of that in a single record set. Finding the correct combination means touring all seven routing policies and the attributes that separate them.
Read articleThe Greenbox Story · Shipping What Matters
Accessibility: A Product Decision, Not a Compliance Tick
A subscriber sends Greenbox an email that changes how they think about the signup flow. It isn't a complaint. It's a question the team didn't know they needed to answer.
Read articleUnder the Hood · Time
What Day Is It?
The date next to the time on your phone is its own kind of fragile. Calendars argue with the moon, the sun, and each other; whole days have been deleted by decree; and the year number on your screen depends on which monk's arithmetic your ancestors trusted.
Read articleThe Workshop
The Workshop: Impact Mapping
A pattern for tracing a business goal through the people whose behaviour has to change, through the changes themselves, to the things you might build — so the team can tell the difference between work that moves the number and work that just feels productive.
Read articleThe Greenbox Story · Shipping What Matters
User Story Mapping: Seeing the Whole
The Greenbox team has a growing backlog of stories but no sense of the whole. User Story Mapping lays out the full user journey, shows the gaps, and makes release planning obvious instead of political.
Read articleThe Workshop
The Workshop: Sprint Planning
A pattern for turning a refined backlog into a sprint the team believes in — a goal, a set of stories, task breakdown, and an explicit commitment — in one focused session.
Read articleUnder the Hood · Time
What Time Is It?
The hour on your phone is a fragile compromise between the sun and politics. Sundials, shipwrecks, railway time, DST, and the volunteer-maintained database that keeps the world's clocks roughly honest.
Read articleThe Workshop
The Workshop: Example Mapping
A pattern for breaking a user story into rules and concrete examples in twenty-five minutes, so the team knows whether it's ready to build before the sprint starts. Facilitator's playbook, failure modes, and what to do with the cards afterwards.
Read articleThe Greenbox Story · Shipping What Matters
Impact Mapping: Connecting Work to Goals
The Greenbox team is shipping features, but are they the correct ones? Impact Mapping connects engineering work to business goals -- and reveals that the obvious next feature isn't always the important one.
Read articleThe Workshop
The Workshop: Event Storming a Process
The default Event Storming session and the one you'll run most often. One process, one wall, everyone who touches it in the room, three hours. You leave with a precise shared model of the flow and a short list of the questions it raised. Where Big Picture looks for shape across a whole domain, Process Level looks for precision within one flow.
Read articleThe Workshop
The Workshop: Event Storming a Domain
The widest zoom, and Brandolini's own entry point to Event Storming. Stand a whole business — or a whole product — in front of one wall with everyone who touches it. The output isn't a design or a plan. It's one picture that every department recognises, and a shortlist of the places worth digging into next.
Read articleThe Greenbox Story · Shipping What Matters
Teaching Your LLM the Codebase: CLAUDE.md and AGENTS.md
The Greenbox team's actual CLAUDE.md and AGENTS.md files. What goes in them, how they're structured, and how they shape the code an LLM generates.
Read articleThe Greenbox Story · Shipping What Matters
Teaching Your LLM the Codebase
Tom and Priya are both using LLMs to write code. They're getting different results. Not wrong -- different. CLAUDE.md is how the team teaches the LLM to write code like them.
Read articleThe Greenbox Story · Shipping What Matters
Behaviour-Driven Development: From Stories to Working Software
Example Maps become stories. Stories become tests. Tests drive code. And in a world where LLMs can write the code, the discovery work matters more than ever -- because the bottleneck isn't implementation any more. It's knowing what to build.
Read articleKitchen and Craft
The Quiet Jar in the Fridge
My last sourdough starter died through a quiet chain of postponed feeds. I'm starting a new one today. Most of what I'm learning as I begin again, I wish I'd known a decade earlier about codebases.
Read articleThe Greenbox Story · From Chaos to Clarity
Sprint Planning: Turning Sticky Notes into Delivery
Walls of sticky notes, a prioritised backlog, concrete examples — and six weeks until the funding deadline. The team has done the discovery. Now they need a rhythm for delivery.
Read articleUnder the Hood · The AI Field Guide
To LLMs… and Beyond!
LLMs are one corner of a much larger field. Diffusion models, reasoning models, multimodal systems, open-weight vs closed — what they are, how they differ, and how to choose.
Read articleThe Greenbox Story · From Chaos to Clarity
Example Mapping: Making Stories Concrete
Four colours of card, twenty-five minutes, and a vague story becomes something you can actually build. Example Mapping is the bridge between understanding and implementation -- and the technique you'll use more than any other.
Read articleUnder the Hood · The AI Field Guide
How LLMs Actually Work
Tokens, transformers, attention, and the training pipeline -- what large language models actually do when they 'predict the next token', why they hallucinate, and why they're so good at code.
Read articleThe Greenbox Story · From Chaos to Clarity
Event Storming: Building Shared Understanding
The Greenbox team covers a wall in sticky notes and discovers they've been building on assumptions. A deep dive into Event Storming -- the workshop that gets an entire domain out of one person's head and into shared understanding.
Read articleThe Greenbox Story · From Chaos to Clarity
Retrospectives: Catching the Wrong Kind of Fast
A small team, a good idea, LLMs generating code at lightning speed, and four weeks of building the wrong thing. The first part of a series on getting from discovery to delivery without wasting everyone's time.
Read articleConsulting and Coding
The Value Is in Ideas, Not Code
LLMs have made code implementation almost trivial. The bottleneck has shifted from writing code to knowing what to ask for. Your library of patterns, concepts, and hard-won experience is now your competitive advantage.
Read articleThe Greenbox Story · From Chaos to Clarity
Minimum Viable Product: The First Box
Twenty-two people signed up from a flyer at the Margaret River farmers market. The first delivery was a disaster -- wrong addresses, wilted spinach, and a box that arrived on Wednesday instead of Thursday. Maya cried in her car. Then she drove to the next address.
Read articleThe Greenbox Story · From Chaos to Clarity
Customer Discovery: Before the First Line of Code
Maya grew up on a farm outside Margaret River. She left to study computer science, spent a decade in consulting, and came back to Perth with an idea that wouldn't let go: what if the best produce in Western Australia could reach people's doors every week?
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