Welcome everybody,
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I'm writing this newsletter while I'm on my way to the first day of the Cyber Accelerator in Tallinn.

This accelerator program will be a massive opportunity to evolve the Askara Team to next level. You can read all about in this new entry.

Enjoy!
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P.s. Make sure to register for Askara's Source Journal through this link: https://askara.solutions/

✍🏻 Week 41, 2025 - Seven Months to Unity

Hey there,

Last week I wrote about the Risk Wheel insight that emerged from our ISO27001 audit. That breakthrough wasn't just a conceptual win—it's become the catalyst for something much bigger: transforming how our entire team works together.

Up until now, we've been operating in a fairly fragmented way, which is completely natural for a young initiative still finding its groove.

Fragmentation

The pattern we've fallen into looks like this: coupled work between a shaper and builder, each solution built for different purposes, with no uniform approach to project management across building cycles. Leading to different levels of outcome and unmet expectations. The usual growing pains of a startup still figuring things out.

The GraphRAG solution we developed for the IAM event was our first real taste of what collaborative development looks like with a team larger than two people. Development and marketing had to align closely, and we got through it. But designing the solution wasn't really part of the equation yet—we were mostly adapting an existing piece of software, and building n8n workflows.

That's about to change.

The Catalyst

The Risk Wheel I introduced last week isn't just a nice conceptual model—it's becoming the fundamental working principle of a novel piece of software we'll be developing through the seven-month Cyber Accelerator programme starting this week in Tallinn.

This shift requires our current team to evolve into a truly unified force of collaboration, which means it's time to start structuring ourselves as a real team.

Here's where I see things going: everybody fulfilling a role in the same solutions we're realising, relying on each other's information to build collaboratively. We're mapping traditional team roles to the Shape Up roles we've defined for ourselves.

The keyword in our approach? Model Driven Development. But not the old version where it took months to get from design to code—the new version where AI bridges that gap in days.

The Vision

This got me taking a trip down memory lane last weekend, thinking about my time with Oxand and how we used this approach in client work.

We were the link between the organisation needing a software solution (the business) and the programmers writing the code (software development). During my time there, I learned a lot about different modelling languages for making diagrams that translated user requirements into visuals developers easily understand to write their code.

I spent parts of the weekend refreshing my memory of these frameworks and tools, and I genuinely enjoyed how my current understanding of AI made me see how this type of working can be taken to the next level. What used to take weeks can now happen in days.

Here's how the flow works in practice:

• A shaper functioning as product owner prioritises features and manages stakeholder expectations, setting the direction for what needs to be built.
• Stewards acting as business analysts then create business processes and functional designs that capture those requirements—this is the critical role that drives code generation. Those designs get fed to AI tools like Claude Code to generate the actual codebase.
• Then builders at various levels take over: a tech lead handles architecture and code review, while developers refine that AI-generated code, implement the business logic, and write tests for rapid requirement verification of small, clearly scoped software components.
• Finally, stewards circle back for implementation and translating test results to the builders, closing the loop.

The beauty is in how each role feeds the next, creating a continuous flow from requirements to working code in weeks rather than months.

The Excitement

I'm genuinely excited about this new phase we're entering as a team. The innovative ideas around how a team like this has to function in the age of AI feel fresh and unexplored.

There's a strong conviction building that getting started on this journey together will turn us into a well-oiled engine, with all the parts working together at incredible speeds.

The fragmentation phase served its purpose. It let us experiment, find our individual strengths, and discover what actually works. Now we're ready to bring it all together into something coherent.

The Risk Wheel gave us the conceptual foundation. Model Driven Development gives us the method. The accelerator gives us the time and resources. And the team? The team is ready to become something more than the sum of its parts.

Let's see what happens when all these pieces finally converge.

With care,
Ben

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