Essay · May 18, 2026
On consulting into regulated industries
There is a species of consulting pitch that treats regulation as weather, an unfortunate external condition to be endured on the way to the real work. We have come to believe the opposite. In a public agency, a utility, or an insurer, the regulation is the real work. The audit trail isn't overhead on the system; in the eyes of the institution, it very nearly is the system.
This changes how you build, and it changes it more than most technical writing admits.
The uncited answer is worthless
In an unregulated context, a plausible answer has value: someone checks it, uses it, moves on. Inside a records-law environment, a plausible answer with no provenance is worse than no answer, because it will be repeated, and eventually it will be repeated under oath. The engineering consequence is simple and unfashionable: retrieval with receipts beats generation with confidence, every time.
Procurement is a design input
We used to treat the procurement process as a gauntlet to survive before the engagement started. It is actually the first requirements document. What an institution is able to buy (the contract sizes, the insurance thresholds, the data-residency clauses) tells you what it is able to operate. A system the institution cannot procure a maintainer for is a system that dies at handoff.
What it does to the work
It slows the first month and speeds every month after. Constraints eliminate whole branches of the design space before you waste a sprint in them. And there's a quieter effect we didn't expect when we started: the people inside regulated organizations have usually been told for years that their constraints make them backward. Show up treating the constraints as legitimate engineering inputs, and you get a kind of candor and partnership that no kickoff workshop produces.
We keep choosing this kind of client. This essay is partly an explanation and partly an admission that we like it here.