Put simply, Cadence is a process coupled with custom-built tooling. The Cadence pillars (Landscape, Audit, Blueprint, Build, etc.) are ways of approaching different parts of a problem, in the way that other product management frameworks like Jobs to Be Done or North Star or even Scrum attempt to break down gnarly problems into a set of mental models, rituals, and artifacts.

The past ten years of C-suite thinking have been dominated by Agile transformation, and that era is now over. In one way, Agile was all about managing the human bottleneck. Kanban boards, sprints, standups — these were rituals designed to break down tasks into manageable chunks so that teams didn’t go off and spend months building the wrong thing. But what took months now takes AI an hour or two. Agile wasn’t built for agents.

Cadence is our attempt to address that fact. It’s our answer to the question: When execution becomes commoditized, how do we work together to deliver the right solution?

Cadence, in practice, is a lot more than vibe coding a prototype or even using AI-assisted software engineering to build a production platform. The Cadence approach helps solution engineers understand the problem space they are working in much more quickly and fully, so they may ideate on good strategies with a client, and collaborate with other disciplines in ways that talking to an AI chatbot simply doesn’t support.

The reason this is significant is that we believe it’s the only way to ultimately deliver a robust, working, secure solution to the problems most companies face. And it can do it much faster than it could a year ago. That’s its promise.

It’s way more than that. Claude Code became so popular not because the model powering it was miles ahead of other companies’ models, but because the harness around the model was really useful. The product work Anthropic did to give access to tools, skills, etc. made it much more helpful than a chat or API interface.

Cadence is our harness — a set of tools, processes, principles, and opinions — that, when coupled with other powerful tools like Claude Code and the latest models and tools available, can produce incredibly good, incredibly reliable product solutions.

Our cofounder Paul Ford once described Cadence as a kind of map. Phase names like “Landscape” and “Explore” already evoke a voyage, and maps are how you navigate a voyage successfully. AI is a new planet of potential, but as with any new realm, it is making a lot of would-be explorers — business leaders — anxious, for plenty of good reasons. They know there is a lot of power, if they could make sense of it. That’s why we created Cadence, to provide the map so we can get the most out of this new era safely, securely, and sensibly.