A client had been offered a pod. Forward-deployed people, agents, a statement of work that said outcomes. On the Tuesday we visited, the pod was in a conference room waiting for requirements. The people who knew the work were in another meeting. The deck had purchased presence. It had not purchased a designed path from a request to a result.
Capacity sitting in a room is not a system.
design the path first
Before you add anyone — hired, contracted, or automated — write the path. What arrives, who touches it, what decision they are allowed to make, what they hand on. If that path is a fog, more people will create more status meetings. More agents will create more drafts of the status meeting.
The useful question for a vendor selling capacity is not how many. It is: which step gets shorter, and who checks the work when that step is wrong.
Headcount, human or not, cannot substitute for a decision you have not made.
keep the owner inside the company
Someone on your payroll still has to want the outcome. A pod can build. An agent can draft. Neither can care whether this is the right thing to ship on your behalf. Name that owner before the kickoff, and give them the authority to stop work that is busy without being useful.
Buy help for a path you can already describe. Do not buy help in the hope that it will describe the path for you.