About
I’m Ross Chapman, creator of the Build Loop. I help UK teams decide what’s worth building, and build enough of it to find out.
The work usually starts in one of a few situations. A board has mandated AI and nobody can name the first thing to build. Someone is ninety days into a new role and needs a visible decision. There are fourteen ideas and one budget. Or there’s a date that can’t move and no agreement on what ships by it.
What I’ve done
For six years I ran design sprints — around 200 of them — in organisations where a wrong bet is expensive and slow to unwind: insurance, pensions, wealth management, risk, and professional membership bodies. Client work has included Marsh McLennan, Quilter and Sikoia.
Across those 200 sprints the same pattern kept repeating. The teams that got somewhere weren’t the ones with the best facilitator or the cleverest framework. They were the ones where real knowledge of the sector met a way of working that reliably produced a decision.
Their expertise, my method. Neither is enough on its own.
What I believe
Design thinking and the design sprint were built for a world where building was expensive. When it took months and a team of engineers to find out whether an idea worked, it made sense to spend weeks de-risking it on paper first. That world has gone.
The constraint has moved. It isn’t “can we build it” any more. It’s “are we building the right thing, and how would we know.” Now that building is cheap, you don’t de-risk an idea on paper. You build a little to find out. Deciding and making aren’t separate steps any more.
And handing over a finished product was never the point. It’s hard to own something you didn’t build. The job is to leave a team that can keep making good calls without you.
The Build Loop
The Build Loop is what I built out of that — a way of taking a decision a team is stuck on and producing an answer with evidence behind it, in days rather than quarters.
The method is free. It lives at thebuildloop.com, along with the canvases and everything you’d need to run one yourself.
Let’s talk
I speak on deciding what to build when building is cheap, what actually happens in the room when a team tries to agree, and why most AI mandates stall before the first build. Conferences, panels and podcasts — get in touch.
For anything Build Loop, start at thebuildloop.com.