The Challenge
With a major industry conference just one week away, Quorum faced a key moment. Their customers, thousands of public affairs professionals working in companies, non-profit organizations, Congress, state legislatures, and government bodies, needed a solution that would truly transform their daily workflow. The team had identified a high-value personalized AI feature that could deliver immediate, tangible value, but conventional wisdom said it would take three weeks to build.
As Estevão Andrade, Senior Director of Engineering at Quorum, explained the urgency: “We had an opportunity to showcase something revolutionary at the conference, something our customers had been asking for. We weren't going to let a tight timeline stop us from delivering value. We wanted to include personalized bill summaries to make the AI Bill Tracking launch even more impactful."
The Approach
Rather than accepting the traditional three-week timeline, Quorum's engineering team took a bold, innovative approach that reflected their culture of challenging assumptions and finding better ways to serve customers.
Key Innovation: Planning-to-Prompt Workflow
- Created detailed execution plans in structured markdown files
- Translated customer requirements directly into actionable prompts for AI-assisted development
- Converted development tasks into context-rich prompts for Augment Code
- Used both local agents in VS Code and remote agents for repetitive tasks
- Maintained rigorous human oversight for review, strategic decisions, and continuous iteration
- Ensured every line of code was optimized for the end-user experience
"We grabbed the Figmas, designs, and mocks, jumped on a call, and did the necessary planning work," Andrade recalls. "We recorded that session and had a complete attack plan by the end, not just technical specs, but a clear vision of the customer value we were creating. We could translate that directly into prompts that preserved our understanding of user needs at every step."
The Results
Timeline Achievement:
- Day 1: Comprehensive planning session and detailed prompt creation, ensuring every requirement is aligned with customer needs
- Day 2: Solid, functional working version completed, demonstrating that speed and quality aren't mutually exclusive
- Day 3: Security compliance review, performance optimization, and final polish, maintaining Quorum's uncompromising standards
Customer Impact:
- Immediate, enthusiastic adoption from target users at the conference
- Strong validation of Quorum's personalized AI approach addressing real workflow pain points, not just adding AI for its own sake
- Competitive differentiation in a crowded market
- Proof that AI could enhance rather than replace human judgment in complex political work
- Validation of Quorum's product vision and customer-centric development philosophy
"People were saying, 'This is the first AI thing I've seen that I'm going to use day-to-day,'" Andrade noted. "That feedback validated everything we believe at Quorum: we're not building technology for technology's sake. We're using innovation to help our customers do their most important work better, faster, and more effectively. That's what drives us."
Key Success Factors
Customer-First Planning: Every execution plan starts with user needs, not technical constraints. Detailed planning in plain language ensured AI-generated code met exact customer specifications.
Structured Innovation: Reusable instruction templates enabled consistent, quality-controlled delegation to AI tools, proving that innovation can be rapid and systematic.
Intelligent Supervision: Engineers focused their expertise on strategic thinking, quality review, and context refinement rather than routine coding tasks.
AI as Strategic Partner: Beyond code generation, AI became a collaborative tool that identified planning gaps, suggested security considerations, and helped the team think more comprehensively about customer needs.
Looking Ahead
Quorum continues expanding its product offering using this accelerated development approach as its standard methodology. The success has validated how context-aware AI can transform development timelines without compromising quality.
"The real acceleration is leveraging agents to create big pieces of code with a supervised approach," Andrade explains."We've validated that we can delegate significant development work while maintaining the quality and attention to detail our customers deserve. This isn't about replacing human judgment, it's about amplifying human expertise so we can focus on what matters: understanding and solving our customers' challenges."