Blog · Page 7
Field notes.
Page 7 of 31. Browse the archive of RFP workflows, grounded-AI architecture, and proposal operations notes.
Win-loss, Part 3 of 5: the five anti-patterns
Lessons logged and never applied. Themes that don't match answered questions. Five failure modes I see when a win-loss program looks healthy from the outside but isn't moving the win rate.
Embedding evaluation, revisited
What we measure differently from 12 months ago. How the gold set grew, which metrics earned their spot in CI, and which ones we quietly retired.
The Presidents' Day proposal stagger
Two RFPs due Wednesday, a federal team off Monday for the holiday. How we resequence the pipeline to land both bids without a Tuesday-night fire drill.
Civic RFP transparency trends, state by state
We scored 50 state procurement portals on five transparency criteria — addenda visibility, debrief access, vendor Q&A publication, awarded-vendor disclosure, and data-portability. Wide variance, four leaders, and a long tail.
The Saturday compliance-matrix catch-up
A 45-minute Saturday routine for a shop that missed the Thursday compliance check-in. Five passes over the matrix, with a stop rule at the first unanswerable row.
The Valentine's Day deadline drill
A weird pattern in our submission data: federal fiscal-year Q2 RFP deadlines cluster around mid-February. Here's the drill we run when three bids land in the same week.
Grounded AI for win-theme discovery
How we surface candidate win themes from a corpus of 80 winning proposals without inventing them. The retrieval pattern, the entailment guard, and where the system refuses rather than guesses.
Win-loss, Part 2 of 5: debrief rituals that actually run
A 30-minute debrief format with four questions and one DRI. Why quarterly debriefs fail, why per-bid debriefs work, and the calendar discipline that keeps the practice alive past month four.
Linking debrief notes to the specific answer blocks that failed
How every debrief comment becomes a KB-block edit suggestion. The two-pass linker that walks from a free-text comment to the exact block that sourced the failed answer, with the SQL and the heuristics.
The 'we lost on price' excuse, decoded
What 'we lost on price' actually masks. An opinion piece, with evidence from the GAO debrief corpus and the patterns I've watched in our own win-loss data.
What 120 public debrief transcripts tell us about why bids lose
We read 120 public debrief and protest decisions — federal GAO and state equivalents — and coded the stated reasons for losses. Four patterns repeat. Three things surprised us.
Shipped: the win-loss dashboard with debrief capture
We shipped the win-loss dashboard last week. It's the feature behind this month's series. Debrief capture, theme clustering, and KB write-back, all wired to the schema.
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