Build work that speaks for itself.
You start to wonder if you still have it.
Skills no one can see start to feel like skills you don't have. They're real. The work speaks for them.
Built for people between roles. You might be finishing a graduate program, or you were laid off from a product or engineering job. See how it fits you
Try a live brief
The room here is a live brief, open right now at Affirm: a problem the company is working on, the people who have already spoken on it, and your turn. Say what you want to be doing, and the room becomes that work.
“I saw Sunday, but I didn’t know if the money would leave Friday or Monday.”
After a turn in the room, this is what you get.
Work that speaks for itself opens doors.
Your work combs the market. When three or more organizations are asking for what it shows, you get a scouting report (straight in your inbox) on what they want and what your work already answers.
No doomscrolling job boards, no AI applying to a thousand jobs for you. This starts from what you've done and only shows you where it fits.
Your first brief is on us, the whole thing: the run, weaving it into a Day One Plan, and the first scouting report written through it.
Predefined success criteria for pilots and workflows
A pilot or workflow needs agreed criteria before its results can decide what happens next.
Your Hex work sets a two-cycle success bar before choosing between accountable readouts and controlled exploration.
Market movement detected
Six organizations are asking for predefined success criteria for pilots and workflows.
The shared practice is to decide what counts as success before a pilot or workflow produces a result. Project44 makes that unusually concrete: an integration has source and destination systems, sequencing, and business rules, with success metrics and acceptance criteria fixed before build and checked after launch.
Context behind the ask
Glean says agreed pass/fail conditions let teams judge an AI agent’s factuality, evidence use, and actions even when they disagree about style.
“A team can disagree on style; it cannot disagree on pass/fail conditions for factuality, evidence use, and action correctness.”
Where to go from here?
The shape of what you're fluent in.
Every brief you commit adds to it. What you used in the work is grouped into areas of fluency, each one named and traceable to the exchange that produced it. The more you commit, the clearer the shape gets.
Fluent in your craft, and able to say so.
Fluency in your craft works like fluency in a language. You have it whether or not anyone has put words to it, because it comes from work you did.
But putting a name to your fluency changes what you can do with it. A named fluency is something you can point to and hand to someone else. That's what makes your real skill into something you can take somewhere.
Your fluency is also your opener.
An opener is one claim your work backs, sent to one organization. You don't argue for yourself in it. You show them the thing you did for their problem, and it stays yours afterward.
A claim travels, too. Someone inside can forward one line and a link. When the questions come back, the work answers them in your reasoning.
Hi Priya,
People miss weekend installments even after they’ve read the reminder. Some think the money leaves on Friday. Some think Monday.
I worked Affirm’s version of this in a simulation. I settle the stop rules and the success bar before anything ships, so that’s where I started: it only goes out if it closes half the weekend gap with reversals flat. I asked the payments ops director for the numbers he’d pause on rather than the principle, and made him the one who owns that call. The argument underneath is that the scheduled date stays the promise, and the bank’s posting date never quietly becomes the thing people expect.
No need to reply unless it’s useful. If you’d rather put questions to it than take my word for any of that, ask my Day One Me anything about it. It answers from the work, in my reasoning.
Shoppers with Pay in 4 plans whose installments fall on weekends or bank holidays miss them even though they opened the reminder.
Busra Erdogan, hourly retail employee, plans groceries around Friday paychecks, and a surprise withdrawal forces her to cut essentials or borrow.
After reading what Maximilian proposed
“If you clearly say Sunday is still my due date but my bank may show it later, I can plan around it. I still need that message before I commit at checkout.”
Maximilian met Busra’s problem with isolating causal effects through comparison. Ask how it relates to yours.
Reduce weekend-related missed installments by making scheduled debit timing understandable before and after checkout.
- Set the bar before launch: roll out only if half the weekend gap closes inside the quarter and reversals stay flat.
- Named who owns the pause, and asked them for numeric stop thresholds rather than a principle.
This is a real plan. Open it and ask it a question yourself ↗
An opener, with a closer too.
The email opens the door, and the plan that comes with it does the closing. It's the work itself, so they can read what you decided and judge it for themselves. It goes to a person at one organization, about a problem of theirs you've already worked. You need one person willing to forward it, and the plan stays yours whether or not they answer.
Built for the stretch between roles.
Everything up to here is true for anyone whose skills have outrun their résumé, and there is a reason that happened. It's hardest between roles, when you're on a clock and a résumé is all anyone sees of you.
Finishing a graduate program
You've spent real money and time building the skills for a new role, and nothing on your résumé proves it yet. That's the MBA moving into product, and the same goes for the degrees below. The briefs give you work to show before you have the job.
Laid off from a product or engineering job
You've done this work for years, as a product manager or an engineer. The proof is inside a company you've left, and you can't show it to anyone. A brief gives you new work on a problem a company is working on right now, and it's yours to show.
The briefs test how you decide. They don't test how you code.
Try a brief in your role
Pick one. The page takes you back up to the live brief, set for that role.
Wondering if you still have it?
Run a brief and see.
The way to find out is to do the work, and your first brief is free. After that, choose how many briefs you want to run each month. Standard and Lite both include everything on this page.
Energy is your monthly balance. Running a brief and keeping it uses 28.
Enough energy for about 9 briefs a month, or a mix of building and outreach.
For when you're really in it.
Scout comes with both. Once your shape holds five briefs or so, you can shift down to $39 a month, which keeps the scouting reports coming without buying more briefs.
Your first brief is on us, the whole thing, with no card: the run, weaving it into a Day One Plan, and the first scouting report written through it. Do all of that before you decide whether any of this is worth paying for.
You still have it. Now it has somewhere to go.
Questions? hello@dayoneme.com