Start with the hard problem.
Take After Duty: help veterans understand their own records and organize them for a VA disability claim, whether they prepare it alone or with a service officer or accredited attorney. Up close, a problem like that is a tangle of hundreds of pages of records, a rating schedule written as regulation, and rules that interact.
Break it into small problems.
Every tangle is made of pieces small enough to solve well:
- Read each record and pull out the facts, with citations
- Find every condition the evidence supports
- Match each one to the rating schedule
- Do the VA math exactly
- Show what evidence is still missing, before the VA has to ask
- Make all of it work on any phone
Solve each one in a fast loop.
Build it, test it, verify it against real cases, ship it. Then take the next piece. Small loops mean you see working software every few days instead of a big reveal months from now, and every small problem is solved before it can grow into a large one.
Let the patterns show.
As pieces are solved, they line up. The way one document is read becomes the way every document is read, and the check on one estimate becomes the check on all of them. Those patterns become the system: crafted for your problem, not borrowed from a template.
Ship a system people rely on.
The result feels finished because every piece was finished. After Duty is built for the web, iPhone and Android, and backed by about 1,900 automated tests across the API and the app.