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CATz Method — Overview

CATz is GrowDirect's two-phase engagement model. It is how we diagnose a retailer's operating state, define the target state, evaluate the architectural options to get there, and execute against the chosen path. It is designed for small-to-mid specialty retailers with an online footprint — the segment that needs a real platform and doesn't have one.

The two phases

Phase I — Assess & Design. What is the retailer's operating reality, what is the prize, and what target state is worth building toward?

Ten workstreams run in parallel within Phase I, each producing its own audit trail:

  1. Executive Interviews
  2. Field Visits (stores, DCs, customer-facing channels)
  3. As-Is Workshops (per business domain)
  4. Executive Visioning
  5. Benchmarking
  6. Balanced Scorecards
  7. Quantitative Analysis (inventory, financial, operational)
  8. Business Case
  9. Presentations (steering committee cadence, final report)
  10. Change Management

Phase I ends with a signed decision: proceed, specific vision, quantified business case.

Phase II — Select & Implement. Given the decision from Phase I, what's the right combination of systems and delivery plan?

Six workstreams run within Phase II:

  1. To-Be Workshops (per domain)
  2. RFP Package (what's being asked for)
  3. RFP Responses (per vendor, structured consistently)
  4. IT Architecture (target state, transition plan)
  5. Scorecard and Shortlist (how vendors are compared)
  6. Contract Negotiation (redlines, LSP/SI engagement, escrow)

Phase II ends with a signed vendor commitment and a funded implementation plan.

The discipline that makes it work

Evidence first, recommendation second. Every finding is anchored to data. Every recommendation closes the loop from evidence to action.

Compilation triad. Raw source → compiled / merged → summarized. Per interview, per store visit, per workshop. The individual files are audit trail; the compilation is the thesis; the summary is what decision-makers read.

Per-domain parallel workshops. Every business domain in scope gets its own as-is and to-be workshop artifact. Rigid, on purpose — the domain boundaries force coverage. No folding Pricing into Forecasting.

Business case triad. Benefits / Costs / NPV. Plus a traceability artifact that maps solution components back to value opportunities. Without the traceability, Phase II becomes untethered.

Steering committee cadence. Numbered, dated, marked Final. SC presentations are the engagement's heartbeat. Every other artifact feeds into a specific SC.

Versioning and "Final" marking. Documents are explicitly versioned. The terminal version is marked Final. Draft and revision status is part of the filename. No one wonders which is canonical.

Two signature deliverables

CATz ships two externally-branded methodology skills under plugins/consulting/:

Both run against a structured client evidence pack (financials, systems inventory, POS data, workshop notes) and produce pptx-native deliverables in the style a board expects.

Who runs the method

Per-role playbooks live in method/roles/. The two novel GrowDirect roles — Data Detective (translates heterogeneous retailer data into the canonical model) and Digital Plumber (wires the canonical model into systems of record) — are what make a small, AI-augmented team capable of engagement-grade delivery.

What makes CATz different

  1. Agent-native. Phase I ingest, as-is analysis, Phase II option modeling — all scaffolded by agents running against the canonical retail data model.
  2. Platform-backed. The same canonical model that anchors the diagnostic is the runtime model of Canary Retail. The engagement lands on a platform, not a deck.
  3. SMB-first. The method compresses the Big-4-grade engagement into weeks for an SMB retailer, not months for a chain of thousands of stores.
  4. Productized. The deliverables are skills, not consultants. They can be run repeatedly. They can be customized per vertical.
  5. Proof case on ourselves. We run the diagnostic on our own platform. Every claim about how it works is grounded in how we built our own.

Adoption

CATz is the method GrowDirect uses for: - External engagement work (SMB retailer onboarding to Canary Retail) - Internal transformation moments (platform v2 moves, major vendor cutovers) - Strategic decisions that would otherwise be ad-hoc (which module to productize next, which partnership to invest in)

The engagement-template/ skeleton under method/artifacts/ is the cloneable starter kit for new engagements.

CATz Method · GrowDirect LLC canary@growdirect.io