We learn the operation before we design the solution.

A monitoring dashboard for a control room and a monitoring dashboard for a factory floor share almost all their code and almost none of their requirements. One is read continuously by trained operators who must act within seconds; the other is glanced at by a supervisor with gloves on, between other tasks. Getting that wrong produces software that works in a demo and is abandoned in a month.

The differences that decide a project are rarely technical. They are the maintenance window you do not get in public infrastructure, the exception handling that is most of the job in manufacturing, the throughput at shift change in a hospital, the reconciliation that has to be exact in banking, the one hour a year that defines an examination platform.

These pages set out what we have learned building in each — not a list of services repeated six times, but the constraints we now design around before writing anything.