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Top of this document is the latest state — current scope, mockups, decisions in force, open questions, next steps. Below the divider is a chronological diary of how we arrived here. Read top-to-bottom for the present; scroll past the divider for the trail of calls, documents, and pivots that produced it.
Eight modules. Six adapted from the broader scope, two new. Sized for the €12k UX engagement plus a focused integration effort on the engineering side (N1).
| # | Module | Form for 15 June |
|---|---|---|
| 07 | Assessment Surface | Native shell wrapping SkillsTX via magic-link (Option A, verified feasible). Symphony-branded intro, progress, return-to-app. SkillsTX’s own screens for the rating step. |
| 10 | Report Screen | Native render of GET /v1/account/{key}/job/{jobType} — clean radial chart, plain-language gap statements, single “next step” CTA. |
| 09 | Manager Review Queue | Native list driven by GET /v1/account/{key}/relationships/employee. Acknowledge or comment per direct report. |
| 25 | Identity & SSO | Pilot-level. DGE SSO if available; magic-link invitations as fallback. |
| 26 | RBAC — Three Roles | Employee · Manager · Executive. Exec view anonymised by aggregation. |
| 28 | i18n + RTL (UI only) | ~100 UI strings translated to Arabic with RTL layout. SFIA content comes from SkillsTX natively. |
| N1 | SkillsTX Integration Adapter (BFF) | Cloudflare Workers + Hono BFF holding the SkillsTX client_secret. ~5–7 endpoint wraps. Engineering, not UX — sits outside the €12k scope. |
| N2 | Executive Overview Screen | Workforce view: completion %, top-N gaps, segmentation. Nightly batch via 150 × job-match calls. ~30–50% chrome reusable from the Lovable repo. |
Seven screens walking the full pilot flow — employee onboarding through to executive view. Symphony brand palette (dark green · antique gold · teal). Scroll horizontally.
Swipe through
The currently-in-force decisions. Anything not on this list is open or deferred. New decisions land here and become history once superseded.
| Decision | Date | By |
|---|---|---|
| SkillsTX is the assessment base. No parallel engine, no rebuild. | 22 May | Brendan + Michi |
| MVP scope = 8 modules (07 · 09 · 10 · 25 · 26 · 28 · N1 · N2). | 22 May | Michi proposed, Brendan agreed |
| Hosting + security = DGE’s responsibility per RFP. Not in our scope. | 22 May | RFP (Brendan confirmed) |
| 15 June = pilot launch, not full production licence. Formal SLA / pen-test / WCAG audit land within Q3. | 22 May | Both |
| Bilingual EN/AR from day one. Retrofitting RTL after build is too expensive. | 19 May | Brendan |
| 50% weighting on behavioural competencies in the rubric (where weighting applies). | 19 May | Brendan |
| Karsten joins post-signing, not before. 25-day window team = Brendan + Michi. | 22 May | Brendan |
| €12k UX scope excludes N1 adapter. Adapter is engineering — pricing and ownership agreed separately. | 19 May → 22 May confirmed | Michi |
| AI surfaces 12–16 deferred. Use SkillsTX’s built-in scoring, mapping, and recommendation logic in v1. | 22 May | Brendan |
| Learning provider integrations deferred (Coursera / Pluralsight / Udemy = links only in v1, no API integration). | 22 May | Brendan |
Questions that block decisions or scope. Each has an owner and a target for when we should have the answer.
Linear tickets currently open or recently closed. The full Linear board is the source of truth.
Concrete actions with owners. As work completes it moves into the diary.
Every call, every document received, every pivot — in the order they happened. Read top-to-bottom to walk the project from the bid win through to today. Gold dots are events; red dots are pivots that changed the shape of the work.
2-minute WhatsApp voice message from Brendan announcing the contract win. Initial framing: ESPER will run the assessment for 150 DGE professionals using SkillsTX as the backbone. Michi is asked to build the UX layer on top of the SkillsTX API. First mention of the Saudi AI taxonomy as a future play.
13-page DGE RFP. Scope: 150 employees, SFIA-aligned assessment in six phases (Framework → Execution → Analysis → Reporting → Presentation → Learning Pathways). Five-phase payment schedule (10% / 30% / 30% / 10% / 20%). Submission language: English or English+Arabic. Bilingual *delivery* is not a hard RFP requirement — that came later as Brendan’s product call.
323 KB PDF response covering ESPER’s methodology, SFIA accreditation, team and approach. ESPER awarded the contract. This is the document that anchors what was promised to DGE — the gravity field every later scope decision is pulled against.
Walked the SkillsTX product live, pulled the public swagger spec, and observed an undocumented internal API. Four critical findings:
/api/contents/{lang} returns 13,504 fully-translated SFIA items in Arabic with inline RTL./v1/account/{key}/link is a working escape hatch — drops a user straight into the SkillsTX self-assessment UI authenticated as themselves./api/jobs/rolebasedsurveyjobs returns 40 named jobTypes.Two architectures identified: Option A (hybrid native shell + embedded SkillsTX rating screens) or Option B (full native via a partner-tier API conversation with Paul).
ESPER’s commercial proposal to HUMAIN (Saudi sovereign AI company). USD 1.7M, 12-week build plus 12-month licence, targeting LEAP 2026 (31 Aug). Names the team: Brendan (Managing Partner), Dr Mohammed Al Qarni (Programme), Karsten Woudstra (UX / Product / Engineering, EMEA). Kyndryl is the named engineering build partner — Dr Shaun Barney (Global Head of AI) as technical lead, Fionnuala Morris (VP & MD Gulf, Levant & Pakistan) as executive sponsor.
Zoom call with Brendan. He reframes Symphony from “DGE UX overlay” to “Workforce Operating System with three deployments”:
Major UX correction: drop the onboarding questions, pre-populate from HR data. Behavioural skills should be 50% weighted. Two distinct views needed: individual (empowerment) and executive (heatmap, decisions). Missing pieces in our prototype identified: pre-populated profile, downloadable IDP, executive heat-map, L&D push intelligence.
Updated 14-phase schedule. Project starts May 18, handover Jul 6. Introduces a new “Symphony Design” column with per-phase design notes from Brendan — includes bilingual EN/AR mentions in 6 places, references to “Symphony-branded JD template”, and explicit acknowledgment that “SkillsTX visualisation is poor — Brendan to create the org-wide view.”
Found richandfancy/remix-of-symphony-ai-insights on GitHub, created 20 May at 09:33 UTC. A Lovable.dev-generated React app with 52 Symphony visualisation components, design-system tokens, and an executive dashboard chrome. Personas hard-coded for HUMAIN: Hani Alahdal (CHRO) and Yasser Shaaban (SVP Head of AI). Confirms the Lovable build is the HUMAIN track design artefact — not a DGE deliverable, but the design palette (Symphony Green + Gold + Teal) and chart components are reusable.
30-page ESPER internal working document. Frames Symphony as a multi-instance platform with hard dates: 1 June MCIT POC, 15 June DGE production go-live, LEAP 31 Aug. Heavy IP-protection language. Engineering specifics (API contracts, 99.9% SLA, n≥5 suppression, pen-test schedule, RACI matrix) suspicious for LLM-generated padding — the product vision sections feel native to Brendan, the engineering sections look stitched-in.
Decomposed the Blueprint into 42 distinct modules across 8 categories: Data Foundation, User-Facing Surfaces, AI Surfaces, Backend Engines, Learning Integrations, Platform Foundation, Compliance, Content Production. Cluster picture: 9 product clusters, ~25 engineers + ~10 specialists for a credible 15 June production launch. Built the analytical case that the maximalist Blueprint is undeliverable in 25 days.
Proposed a minimalist 8-module MVP as the only buildable scope: 07 Assessment, 09 Manager Queue, 10 Report, 25 SSO, 26 RBAC, 28 i18n, plus two new modules (N1 Integration Adapter, N2 Executive Overview).
Asked Brendan directly: is there an EMEA team, prior Symphony codebase, anything beyond the visible? Answer: “He gave me everything they have; so that’s it.” What exists is SkillsTX + the Lovable prototype + Brendan + Michi. No hidden engineering capacity.
Codified the SkillsTX findings into a Pre-Flight Check section. Added 7 horizontally-scrollable mobile mockups in the Lovable design system showing the full pilot flow (Welcome → Personal landing → Assessment → Results → IDP → Manager view → Executive overview, dark). Added a sticky left TOC with IntersectionObserver-based active-section tracking. Deployed to Cloudflare Pages at symphony-mvp.pages.dev. Discovered the company is ESPER (not Espen, which was a typo propagated through Michi’s local files) — auth gate updated with the official ESPER mark from esper.global.
Brendan opens with “who the fuck are all these people?” (re: 42-module decomposition). Within 25 minutes he’s aligned. Summarises the MVP back in his own words: “MVP Abu Dhabi, RFP-driven, security, Arabic, assessment, full, and SkillsTX, so the document itself.”
Key new information surfaced:
Repurposed from one-shot MVP brief into a living journal. Top section = current state (status, scope, mockups, decisions, open questions, tickets, next steps). Bottom section = chronological diary of every call, document and pivot. Goal: anyone landing on the URL at any future point can read top-to-bottom and understand both where the project stands and how it got there.