About
What Hazard Labs is
Hazard Labs exists because some ideas do not survive contact with a statement of work. It is an incubator: a place to build software we own outright, on infrastructure we run, at our own risk and on our own schedule.
Each property stands alone — its own product, its own users, its own decisions. What they share is a bench, a set of standards, and the same people answering the email.
How we work
Concretely, this is the way of working
- How a property gets picked up
- Three things have to be true. We understand the problem in enough detail to write a specification about it. The people who have that problem are small enough to be underserved by the software that already exists. And one team can operate the result without a department behind it. If a candidate fails the third test it stays an idea.
- Specification first
- Nothing here gets built from a conversation. Each property has a specification in version control — numbered requirements, decisions recorded with the date they were taken, and the questions still open listed as open. It is written before the code and kept current after it. Where the code and the specification disagree, one of them is a defect, and we say which one.
- We run what we build
- The hosting is ours: our hardware, our backups, our certificates, our upgrades, our pager. That is more work than renting a platform, and it is the reason we can say exactly where a user’s data sits and how few external services it passes through.
- Properties stand alone
- No shared sign-in, no shared database, no shared mailing list. Using one property does not make you a user of another, and there is nothing to be cross-sold. A property that is wound down goes on its own, and its status here changes to say so.
- Status is stated, not implied
- Every property on this site carries one of five states: live, in development, specification, internal, retired. Two of the three here are specifications today. We would rather print that than let a landing page imply a product you could use this afternoon.
The parent
Where the lab sits
Hazard Labs is the incubator arm of Depth Consulting Ltd, a consultancy that sells Kanban and management practice work and builds software on contract.
The consultancy is where engagements live. The lab is where the products the company owns live, and the split is deliberate. Work done to somebody else’s statement of work belongs to the client who paid for it. Nothing on this site is that. The properties here were chosen, funded and built by us, they are run by us, and when one of them turns out to be wrong that is ours as well.
That is the whole of the relationship. If you came looking for consulting services, they are over there, not here.
Who
Who you are actually talking to
Hazard Labs is small. Small enough that the people who write the software are the people who read the inquiry address — there is no support tier in front of them and no account manager to route you through.
We do not publish a team page and there is no advisory board. If that changes, this section changes with it.
Get in touch
If this is the way you like to work
Collaboration, a question about one of the properties, or something else entirely — one form, one inbox, and a person at the end of it.