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PursuitAgent
House byline · 93 posts.
The Monday bid-board review, a year on
A year of running the same Monday ritual. Three changes we made to the review itself after 52 weeks — and one we wish we'd made sooner.
Shipped: auto-generated post-mortem themes
After 200 debriefs the themes cluster predictably. The clustering is now automatic — here's what ships, what it does, and what it refuses to do.
The Saturday KB hygiene drill
Thirty-five minutes of knowledge-base maintenance that keeps Monday's drafts from citing stale content. A year in, here's the drill that actually stuck.
April DDQ patterns, a year later
A field note on the questionnaires that landed this week — what's repeating from last April, what's new, and the two categories that are quietly eating the most response time.
The Saturday scope-creep kill list
A 10-minute Saturday drill. Four questions that retire a pursuit before it eats another sprint — so Monday's bid board reflects what your team can actually win.
Shipped: grounded-summary export with inline sources
The export path customers have asked for since month one. Executive summary exports now carry the inline citations as hyperlinks in the DOCX and PDF outputs, with an appendix that lists every evidence source in order.
Three exec summaries I rewrote this week, part 12
A short Friday field note — three exec summaries rewritten this week. A commercial SaaS bid, a federal task-order response, and a managed-services renewal. The standalone installment before Monday's long-form pillar.
DDQ season is now year-round
In 2025 the DDQ volume showed a clear seasonal peak — Q4 renewal cycles, January onboarding. A year later the seasonality has flattened. What changed and what it means for capacity planning.
The capture-lead role, reconsidered
The shape of the capture-lead role we started with, the shape it became, and why the difference matters for anyone hiring into the role in 2026.
The Q2 FY kickoff Monday-morning triage
Eight federal RFPs dropped into the queue over the first weekend of Q2 FY. The 25-minute drill that sorts them into respond-today, respond-this-week, and wait-for-the-amendment.
In preview: per-answer quality score with breakdown
A four-dimensional quality score — clarity, grounding, compliance, brevity — is rolling out in preview on drafted answers. How the score is computed, where it lives in the UI, and what it changes about the review pass.
The Saturday review of outgoing pursuits
A 15-minute Saturday ritual for reviewing the week's outgoing proposal pursuits. Three questions, applied in order: what to kill, what to push, what to staff up. The cheapest pipeline discipline we run.
Three exec summaries I rewrote this week, part 11
Part 11 of the monthly series. Three real executive summaries, anonymized, rewritten. What was wrong in the original, what changed in the rewrite, and what each one taught about the shape of the RFP it responded to.
DDQs from non-US buyers are shaped differently
A field note on three field-level differences between US, UK/EU, and APAC DDQs. Different privacy regimes, different data-residency framings, different evidence conventions. Small shifts that bite if you answer them on autopilot.
Shipped: bulk RFP ingest with duplicate detection
A short changelog entry. Bulk ingest of 10 RFPs in a minute, with block-level duplicate detection so the same clauses across multiple RFPs don't double-count in your KB.
The federal March pipeline looks like this
A short field note on what our own federal-opportunity stream surfaced this week. Three clusters, one surprise, and what it tells us about the FY Q2 surge.
Federal FY Q2 prep weekend
A two-hour weekend checklist for a team about to enter the March federal spike. What to reconfirm, what to clear off the plate, what to tell your SMEs.
The weekly DDQ evidence-freshness sweep
A 20-minute weekly routine that catches stale evidence links before a reviewer does. What the sweep covers, what it skips, and why we recommend it for teams that answer more than one DDQ a month.
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.
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.
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.
Three exec summaries I rewrote this week, part 10
The monthly exec-summary teardown, continuing. Three real openings rewritten this week. What was wrong, what I changed, and the rule each rewrite reinforced.
In preview: proposal templates v2 with custom sections
Template inheritance replaces copy. Sections defined once, customized per tenant, updated in one place. In preview behind the templates feature flag while the marketed Proposal Builder surface catches up.
The capture-to-proposal handoff checklist
Seven fields the capture team has to deliver before the proposal team starts writing. Why most handoffs fail on three of them, and how to enforce the handoff as a gate rather than a courtesy.
RFIs and RFPs are distinct work
Why treating an RFI like an early draft of an RFP response loses the relationship. RFIs are informational for the buyer, not a preview of evaluation. Respond to them as such.
The January past-performance backfill ritual
Two hours in mid-January to refresh last year's past-performance references so they actually carry the weight they need to for this year's bids. The shortlist, the edits, the re-approvals.
Shipped: keyboard-first KB search
A small thing that power users have been asking for since month three. Keyboard-first KB search with a reachable command palette, typed result filtering, and no mouse required to open, navigate, and act on a chunk.
Three exec summaries I rewrote this week, part 9
The January installment of the rewrite series. A public-sector services bid, a SaaS renewal proposal, and a financial-services DDQ opener. Three before-and-afters and what each rewrite was actually doing.
The January proposal-pipeline reset
A 90-minute ritual for the first working Saturday of the year. Archive finished bids, retire dead opportunities, and prune the active list. The point is a pipeline that reflects what you will actually work on in Q1.
The week between Christmas and New Year, for proposal teams
The slowest week of the year has a use. Five low-overhead rituals that cost an afternoon each, capture the year's learning, and set up the team for a clean January. What to do when nothing is landing.
The Christmas Day silent-inbox note
Nothing is shipping today. No buyer is responding. No clarification question is getting answered. This is the correct default, and here is why we built the system around it.
A Christmas Eve draft review note
Two drafts crossed my desk this morning, Christmas Eve. What they said, what they missed, and why the review still happened despite the date.
The holiday handoff runbook, part 2: the questions we forgot
Follow-up to the holiday handoff runbook. Four prompts we missed the first time — covering portal credentials, unsubmitted addenda, decision-of-last-resort authority, and the quiet bids you forgot you were still on the hook for.
The DDQ evidence-gap audit before year-end
A 60-minute audit that surfaces the DDQ answers you can no longer support with current evidence. Run it before the auditor in February asks. The answers that survive the audit are the ones worth keeping in the library.
The holiday handoff runbook
What to write so the on-call proposal lead isn't paged at 11pm on December 23. A 30-minute template that pays for itself the first time a portal deadline moves.
The December DDQ panic day
A field note on the second Monday of December: what buyers send, why they send it then, and what the vendor side should do about it.
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.
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.
In preview: the post-mortem pipeline at submit close
The moment a proposal marks won or lost, PursuitAgent opens a structured post-mortem against the captured pair. In preview while the post-mortem template, reflection, and write-back loop mature toward general availability.
The rolling Q4 capacity plan for proposal teams
A five-week look-ahead that reallocates the proposal team twice. Why a static quarterly plan breaks in Q4, and what a rolling version does instead.
The DDQ wave: what the inbox looks like this week
Mid-November volume snapshot across our own fleet. Volume, topic distribution, and the two categories growing fastest this week compared to the baseline.
Three exec summaries I rewrote this week, part 7
The November installment of the rewrite series. A defense bid, a commercial RFP, and a security-questionnaire cover letter. Three before-and-afters and what each rewrite was actually doing.
In preview: auto-attachment of evidence on DDQ answers
Auto-attachment of evidence PDFs — SOC 2, pentest, policy documents — to DDQ answers that cite them. In preview for design-partner tenants while DDQ workflows mature toward general availability.
The recycled-DDQ-answers audit
A one-afternoon audit that finds the 40 recycled answers in last year's questionnaires that are silently wrong now. What to look for, what to rewrite, what to retire.
Color-team review: the full playbook
The operational companion to our color-team essay. Step-by-step procedures for pink, red, gold, and white teams — when to run each, who attends, the rubrics they apply, and the templates that make the discipline portable.
The Halloween submit weekend triage
Operational note for proposal teams facing weekend deadlines. Three rules we run on every weekend submit. Short, written down so we can find it again next Halloween.
The federal Q1 push: triaging three RFPs at once
The 90-minute drill we use when three federal solicitations drop in the same day. Three buckets, four questions per bid, one written decision. The thing you cannot afford to do on a Friday afternoon in October.
Shipped: bulk edit for answer blocks, with undo
A real-world request we dragged our feet on for nine months. Bulk edit is now in the product, with version-aware undo and a confirmation flow that prevents the silent overwrite that made us nervous in the first place.
The Q4 DDQ surge is almost here
Procurement-side patterns for Q4 2025: what buyers are sending right now, what volume looks like at the question level, and what to expect in the next eight weeks.
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.
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.
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.
The federal fiscal-year clock just reset
The federal fiscal year started yesterday. Here is what Q1 procurement volume actually looks like, what bids land in the next 90 days, and how a small proposal team should staff for it.
The 20-minute proposal retro
The ritual we run after every submit. Five questions. One owner per action item. Twenty minutes. Why most proposal post-mortems don't happen and what makes this one stick.
Procurement-side pain is real — and underserved
Buyers also hate the category. Three quotes from public procurement blogs and what they tell us about how the industry has under-served the buyer side of the RFP relationship.
The scoring rubric on the first read of any RFP
Three minutes. Find the scoring paragraph. Note the page, the heading, and the weights. The habit that shapes the entire response — and why most teams skip it.
The Monday-morning RFP triage standup
15 minutes, four questions, one decision. The weekly ritual that replaces inbox scraping and stops bid/no-bid from happening by drift.
Shipped: answer-block tagging for win/loss cross-reference
A small change with a downstream payoff. Every answer block now carries tags for buyer, sector, theme, and outcome — wiring the foundation for the win/loss cross-reference work next month.
Three exec summaries I rewrote this week, part 5
Continuing the field-note series. Three before-and-after passages from real (anonymized) executive summaries, with the rewriting reasoning made explicit.
In preview: SME-ask tickets with SLA timers
Every SME ask creates a ticket with a deadline derived from the bid date. Open tickets show on the proposal dashboard. Missed SLAs flag, they don't auto-chase. In preview alongside the Proposal Builder section-assignment surface.
The second-question rule for SME asks
A short field-note on how to ask SMEs for input. Ask one concrete question first; save the open-ended one for after you've got the first answer.
The Saturday shuffle: reprioritizing the proposal queue
A 10-minute weekly ritual that reprices every active proposal against its actual deadline pressure and probability of win.
Amendments are the real RFP
Why the third amendment usually contains the evaluation criterion that decides the bid, and what it means for how teams structure intake.
The Friday DDQ batch we process in under an hour
What automation does to a weekly batch of security questionnaires, and the four things it still can't do.
A past-performance story in three sentences
The compressed form that reads well, scores well, and survives the page-budget cut. One example, annotated.
In preview: question router v2 with confidence scores
DDQ questions now route with a confidence score in preview. High-confidence routes auto-draft from the KB; low-confidence routes to human review with a typed reason for the routing call.
The Friday-afternoon submit is a code smell
When proposal teams routinely submit at 4pm on Fridays, the late-week pattern reveals capacity and capture-hygiene problems upstream. What the smell tells you and what to fix.
Mandatory vs. desirable requirements, in plain English
The distinction that costs bidders contracts. Four examples of how mandatory and desirable requirements look in real RFP language and how to score them differently.
Shipped: answer-block inheritance across projects
When you edit an approved KB block, in-flight proposals inherit the change without overwriting their local edits. Here's how the merge resolves and what we did about the conflict cases.
The DDQ answer-reuse myth
The pitch is: every DDQ is mostly the same, so reuse the answers. The reality is: every DDQ is mostly similar but just different enough that naive reuse fails. The gap between similar and identical is where the work lives.
Shipped: win/loss pair capture at submit time
When a proposal hits submit, PursuitAgent now captures the response, the disposition, and the structured post-mortem inputs into a single record. The first piece of the win/loss intelligence loop is in production.
Stop CC-ing your SMEs, part 2
Six weeks after we said stop CC-ing your SMEs on every email, here are the patterns that have actually shown up in disciplined teams. The replacement was not a tool — it was a queue.
The Sunday night compliance check
A 15-minute habit before Monday's kickoff. Read the compliance matrix against the calendar. Find the four things that will hurt you in week three. Write the email Sunday night so Monday is not the day you discover them.
Shipped: answer-block diff view for reviewers
When a drafted answer is regenerated against a different KB block, reviewers now see a side-by-side of the previous version and the current version. Shipped this week.
The proposal week bracketing July 4th
Federal buyers don't move. Commercial buyers don't move. Reviewers do. A short field note on the bid weeks bracketing the July 4th holiday and the four things to triage now.
Shipped: the inline verify button in drafts
Hover any drafted sentence in the proposal builder and a verify button surfaces the source block, the entailment trace, and the timestamp of the last KB update. Shipped this week.
A compliance matrix in thirty minutes, not two days
A compliance matrix is the scaffold the rest of the proposal is built on. Most teams build it by hand from a PDF, and it takes two days. Here's the path from PDF to matrix in 30 minutes.
The Friday 4pm review is the wrong ritual
End-of-week color-team reviews are the default in most proposal shops. The reviewers are tired, the writers can't fix anything, and the meeting becomes a tracker entry instead of a review. There's a better cadence.
Shipped: multi-doc RFP ingest with attachment dependencies
RFPs ship as bundles. The scoring rubric, the technical appendix, the pricing workbook. The Analyzer now ingests all of them as one pursuit, with dependencies tracked between them.
Shipped: KB block freshness alerts in review
Stale KB content now flags itself before a reviewer touches it. The freshness signal sits inline on every drafted answer that cites a block past its refresh date.
The shadow SMEs who should be on every proposal invite
Three roles answer the hardest questions on most proposals and aren't titled as experts. How to identify them in your org and why they belong on the kickoff invite.
In preview: DDQ question classification
Every question in an ingested DDQ is classified at intake into finance, legal/privacy, security, or operations buckets. In preview behind a feature flag — DDQ is a pursuit-type the marketed platform does not yet describe.
Shipped: auto-generated compliance matrix from ingested RFPs
Stage 4 of the RFP pipeline — the compliance matrix — is now one click away from intake. Drop a PDF in, get a matrix out. Here's what shipped and where it still needs a human.
Reviews watch: what G2 and Capterra said this week
Five reviews from G2 and Capterra worth reading if you're shopping the proposal-software category. Loopio, Responsive, QorusDocs, Upland Qvidian — the patterns that recur.
Shipped: content-block freshness scores
Every KB block now carries a freshness score that decays as the source ages, drifts from the company's current marketing language, or contradicts a more recent block. Stale citations get caught at draft time.
Three exec summaries I rewrote this week
Three before/after exec summary openings — illustrative, not customer-attributed. The pattern is the same: replace the abstract with the specific, replace the categorical with the buyer.
The proposal backlog after a long weekend
Memorial Day Tuesday: 11 RFPs in the inbox, three SMEs back from PTO, and 90 minutes before standup. Three triage moves we use.
Shipped: diagram-aware extraction via Gemini 2.5 Flash
System architecture diagrams are now first-class KB blocks. We extract them with Gemini 2.5 Flash, store the description as text and the structure as D2 code, and retrieve both.
In preview: per-block source permissions
Per-block permissions in the KB — control which teams or roles can read, draft from, or edit each content block, with audit trails on every read. In preview while the marketed KB surface catches up.
Stop CC-ing your SMEs
The 48% SME-bottleneck stat has held steady for five years. Most teams treat it as a people problem. It is a workflow problem. Replace the CC chain with a ticketed ask that has a deadline and a single owner.
Shipped: content-block versioning in the KB
Every content block in your knowledge base now keeps an immutable version history. Drafts that cited a block stay tied to the exact text they cited, even after the block is edited.
See the proposal workflow
Take the 5-minute tour, then start a trial workspace when you're ready to run a real pursuit against your own source material.