Decide what’s worth building — before you build it.

I’m Damien Gallagher. I help founders, small teams, charities and social enterprises turn an uncertain idea into an evidence-backed decision, in days rather than months.

Book a free 45 minutes

No pitch. You’ll leave with a clearer view of your decision whether or not we work together.

Damien Gallagher

Where you are

You’re probably here because one of these is true.

  • You’ve got a dozen prototypes and no way to choose between them.
  • You’ve got three ideas and the budget for one.
  • You’re passionate about an idea but you’re worried you’re about to commit £40k without being certain.
  • Everyone in the room agrees — and that’s what worries you.
  • Your sessions keep producing small, safe ideas.

Why a sprint

De-risk months of development.

The expensive mistake is rarely building badly. It’s building the wrong thing well: a capable team, a few months, a real budget, and a launch nobody needed. AI has made building faster, which makes this mistake easier to make, not harder. You find out after you’ve spent it.

A sprint reverses the order. In a few days, before you commit, we take your riskiest assumption and test it:

  • A few days, not a few months
  • A handful of people, not a full team
  • The people it’s for, reacting to something real, before you commit

If the answer is “don’t build this”, that’s the cheapest result you’ll ever buy.

How we work together

It starts with the problem, not the solution.

Solving the wrong problem well is the most expensive thing you can do, and it rarely announces itself until the money’s gone.

That’s what the free 45 minutes is for — everything after that is designed around what we find. The three shapes below are the ones that come up most often, not a menu to choose from.

Discovery Sprint Half or full day, with you or your team

For when you know something needs deciding but not what the actual question is.

We agree a starting question beforehand so the day opens on the real problem rather than warming up to it. In the room we map what you know, separate it from what you’re assuming, and get the ideas out of the people who don’t normally get heard — usually where the useful ones are. Then we narrow, deliberately, to one direction. A written summary follows within two days, in language you can forward to whoever wasn’t there.

You leave with — the problem framed, the options on the table, and one decision made.

Idea Validation Sprint Two to three days

For when you’ve got a direction and you’re about to prove it the expensive way.

We identify the assumption that would hurt most if it were wrong, turn it into a testable hypothesis, and agree what evidence would settle it. Then we build something real enough for a stranger to react to — AI-assisted prototyping means testable takes hours, not sprints. Then we put it in front of five or six of the people you’re trying to reach and watch what they do, which is reliably different from what they say.

You leave with — a tested prototype, what people did with it, and evidence instead of opinions.

Thinking Partner Ongoing, roughly a day a month

For when the thinking is the bottleneck and there’s nobody to do it with.

A standing session each month shaped by whatever’s live, plus a line to me in between for what can’t wait. Sometimes that’s a decision to work through; sometimes it’s finding the hole in a plan before your board does. No deliverables unless a deliverable is genuinely useful.

You get — a standing conversation with someone who has no stake in the answer being comfortable.

What it costs. Every engagement is scoped around your decision and quoted as a fixed price after our free 45 minutes, so there are no surprises. If you have a budget or a grant to work within, tell me and I’ll shape the work to fit it.

Background

Twenty years of asking the question underneath the question.

  • Ten years at Which?Built the design discipline and led a highly retaining team with a 9/10 employee engagement score. Changed how the organisation made product decisions through cross-departmental working, Design Sprints now standard across the business, and evidence-based design that helped teams decide what was worth building.
  • Eleven years running BetenoirMy own digital agency, mostly for public sector and charity clients. I know what it’s like to be the person signing off the budget, and the one accountable for what it delivers.
  • Google Design Sprint Master FacilitatorThe work I learned most from started with a deceptively simple question: how do we make Which? valuable every day, not just when someone’s making a major purchase? It led to a live pilot that beat its revenue target and won Board and Council investment. Finding that kind of question — and answering it — is the part I enjoy most.

On AI

AI makes options cheap. It doesn’t make choosing easy.

A team can now produce a dozen polished prototypes in the time it used to take to make one. The hard part hasn’t moved: knowing which one will actually work for the people it’s for, and get your organisation where it wants to go. Some of them look slick and exciting and would do nothing for your users. The risk used to be building the wrong thing slowly. Now it’s being buried in things that look right, and backing the most impressive one.

I build AI-assisted workflows for the specific problem in front of me — which is why a one-day session can now cover ground that used to take a fortnight.

That isn’t a claim about tools I bought. The most recent example is my own: six months of research into a venture I’m co-founding, seventeen in-depth interviews analysed against ONS, HSE and NHS England data, with the analysis workflow built for that project specifically. It’s the most thorough discovery I’ve run, using exactly the methods I’d bring to your problem.

What people say

What it’s like to work with me.

“He listens well before proposing anything, and was able to translate what we wanted into something we hadn’t articulated ourselves.

I’d strongly recommend him for digital discovery and strategy work — actually working out what’s worth building before spending lots of money.”

Jacquie Irvine Director, Good Values Agency — a client of Damien’s across two decades

“Damien ran the sessions people actually wanted to be in — not because they were enjoyable, though they were, but because something got decided.

If you’ve got a team that’s stuck, or a decision that keeps getting deferred, he’s who I’d put in the room.”

Murray Brown Head of Product Design, BPP — worked in Damien’s team at Which? for four years

“Plenty of people can pitch a big idea; far fewer can land one in a room of engineers, product managers and stakeholders and come out with a genuinely workable solution.

Worth talking to if your team keeps landing on small solutions that are not shifting the needle.”

Rick Lippiett Product & Experience Design Leader — Damien’s manager at Which?

Next step

Start with a free 45 minutes.

Bring the decision you’re circling. We’ll spend the time on it properly — the problem underneath it, what it costs to get wrong, and what would have to be true for you to be confident.

It isn’t a sales call. It’s the first hour of the work, and it’s the fastest way for both of us to find out whether I can actually help.

Book a time

Or email me: damien@betenoir.net