Blog · Page 13
Field notes.
Page 13 of 31. Browse the archive of RFP workflows, grounded-AI architecture, and proposal operations notes.
Preview: what compounding means for proposal software
The thesis in 900 words. Every RFP you win makes the next one easier — what that actually requires, and why most proposal software is structurally incapable of it.
Q4 2025 RFP volume retrospective
A sector-by-sector look at what the final quarter of 2025 told us about buyer priorities, AI-disclosure requirements, and where volume landed versus Q4 2025.
Shipped: export to .docx with formatting fidelity
The boring feature that unblocks federal submissions. What formatting fidelity actually means, what we preserved, and what we couldn't.
Three exec summaries I rewrote this week, part 8
The December installment of the rewrite series. A year-end DDQ-fronted RFP, a public-sector re-compete, and a managed-services renewal. Three rewrites and what each one was actually doing.
Detecting ungrounded spans in drafts, line by line
A per-sentence classifier that flags which spans in a drafted RFP answer lack source coverage in the retrieved context. What it costs, what it catches, and what it still misses.
Retrieval eval snapshot, December 2025
Quarter four retrieval evaluation numbers against our held-out RFP and DDQ corpus. What moved since September, what's still stuck, and which regressions we're not yet fixing.
Year-end DDQ surge: how to staff it
The operational playbook for running 40 to 60 due-diligence questionnaires through a small security and proposal team in the last six weeks of the year, without losing the team.
End-of-year product priorities, in public
What we're building in December and January, why those and not the alternatives. An honest account of the four bets we're making and the three we deliberately deferred.
AutogenAI one year later: follow-up on the August teardown
Revisiting the AutogenAI teardown from August. Three things that changed in their positioning and product, two that didn't, and one thing we got wrong the first time.
The Cyber Monday color-team review
A field note on the unusual pattern of scheduling a pink-team review on a holiday long weekend. When it works, when it doesn't, and the one rule that keeps it from backfiring.
Black Friday, but for B2B procurement
A quirky pattern from our own inbox: new-vendor DDQs spike in the week after Thanksgiving. A short note on why, and what the seasonality does to team planning.
Proposal post-mortems: the discipline, the template, the follow-through
The canonical long-read on proposal post-mortems. What a post-mortem actually accomplishes, the template that makes the discipline sustainable, how to get a debrief from the buyer, and the three follow-through patterns that work.
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