Blog · Page 17
Field notes.
Page 17 of 31. Browse the archive of RFP workflows, grounded-AI architecture, and proposal operations notes.
KB block versioning: the five-year commit history
How a KB block evolves across 18 proposals, three approvals, and one rollback. The data model behind block versioning, why we keep every prior version, and the queries that make it useful.
Six months of the blog: what readers keep coming back to
Six months in, three posts keep getting shared, two flopped, and one surprised me. Notes from the founder on what the field-journal experiment is teaching us about what proposal practitioners actually want to read.
Loopio at ten: what a decade of reviews tells us
Reading 10 years of public Loopio reviews end-to-end. The trajectory of buyer sentiment from 2016 to 2025, what the product fixed, what it never did, and what the trajectory predicts for incumbent RFP tools generally.
The Saturday backlog triage pattern
Thirty minutes on a Saturday morning, three buckets, and Monday is ready to go. A small operational ritual we use to keep the proposal backlog from compounding into chaos.
Grounded AI is not a feature, it's a refusal
Opinion. The thing that makes grounded AI different from regular AI is what the system refuses to do — answer when retrieval is empty. Here's what we will not ship even when reviewers ask for it.
SME collaboration, reconsidered
The 48% bottleneck hasn't moved in five years. Every playbook that attacks it via better communication has failed. The economic frame, three patterns that partially work, the one that fully works, what tooling must do.
SME collaboration, reconsidered: the preview
The async-first SME workflow we wrote about all year was half-right. Two hundred real interviews and a year of customer data later, here is what we got right, what we got wrong, and what the canonical post tomorrow will argue.
The background job queue for proposal processing
How Hatchet orchestrates the ingest, classify, draft, and verify stages of a proposal response. The four stages, the retry policies, the dead-letter handling, and the one place we deliberately chose synchronous over async.
Compliance-matrix tooling, a quick bake-off
Four tools, one 60-page state RFP, the same compliance matrix task. Time-to-matrix and accuracy against a hand-built reference. The results were closer than I expected and the failure modes were different than I expected.
Healthcare RFP compliance patterns
An analysis of HIPAA, HITRUST, and data-residency clauses across 50 hospital-system RFPs. What language is now standard, what is still customer-specific, and the three clauses that have sharpened since 2024.
The amendment checklist every proposal manager should run
An RFP amendment lands. Six questions to answer before you click 'acknowledge receipt.' Each one has bitten a team I know in the last 18 months.
Three exec summaries I rewrote this week, part 6
The October installment of the rewrite series. A SaaS bid, a federal IT services bid, and a healthcare DDQ-fronted RFP. Three before-and-afters and what each rewrite was actually doing.
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