Ten engagements, one thirty-minute SLA

Graphem Solutions sells trust. The firm runs ten-plus concurrent engagements at any given time — SaaS, e-commerce, CRM integration, mobile, hosting — and the line that wins clients is a thirty-minute response SLA against any inbound. That SLA is not a marketing line. It’s the operating constraint everything else has to fit inside.

I joined as CTO Assistant in September 2025 and was promoted to Technical Project Manager four months later. This is what I do here.

What changed in four months

The promotion wasn’t a job-title rebrand. The mandate widened from supporting the CTO across mandates to owning technical scope, estimation, and squad coordination on the full-stack programs the firm leads. I sit between the engineering side — where the work gets done — and the business side, where roadmaps are negotiated against deadlines that don’t move.

What stayed the same: I still write code when a thorny question demands it, still review architecture, still close the loops that nobody else has time to close. What changed: ten things now happen at once instead of three, and the quality of my notes is the difference between the firm hitting its SLA on a Tuesday morning and missing it.

Coordinating ten things at once

The squad I run with is five to ten engineers and designers, depending on what’s in flight. The stacks are heterogeneous — Laravel and Vue on the bespoke side, Node where it suits, WordPress and Shopify and WooCommerce on the productized side, HubSpot for the CRM-integration mandates. SMB and enterprise clients across Canada and the United States, each with their own delivery tempo.

The thirty-minute SLA means the system has to be designed for it. That looks like: triage rules that route inbound to the right engineer without a meeting, status that’s accurate to the half-hour, and a posture where every active engagement has a named owner who can answer a client question in their language — sales, marketing, executive, technical — without escalating.

Ten engagements at this tempo is a coordination problem, not an engineering one. The engineering work is real but it’s the easier half. The harder half is making sure nothing falls between the seams.

Documentation as engineering

The lever that’s compounded fastest is internal documentation and knowledge-management standards. When I joined, onboarding was tribal — new engineers learned by sitting next to old engineers. Handoffs between engineering, design, sales, and leadership lost time at every seam.

I authored the standards we now use: how we shape an estimate, how we structure a technical proposal, how we document an architecture decision, how we hand a feature off, how we close out an engagement. None of it is novel as an idea. The work is making it consistent, making it the path of least resistance, and making sure people actually use it.

Onboarding compressed. Handoff friction dropped. The thirty-minute SLA got easier to hit not because the engineering got faster but because the seams got smoother.

The work continues. Every quarter, the firm takes on more programs, the surface area widens, and the operating discipline that holds it together has to widen with it. That’s the job.