Design Partner Program
Proposal work in consulting is still surprisingly fragmented, cognitively expensive, and dependent on repetitive manual synthesis.
We are shaping a new operating model for consulting proposals — with a small number of design partners.
What we are building
Cognitive Alpha is building proposal workflow infrastructure designed specifically for boutique consulting firms and high-trust presales environments.
Not an AI slide generator. Not a deck design tool. Infrastructure — the kind that handles the cognitive work that happens before a single slide is written: structuring the situation, surfacing relevant firm knowledge, synthesising the narrative thread that makes a proposal land.
Why design partners
We want to shape this together with firms that deeply understand proposal work.
Proposal work is highly contextual. The quality of a proposal depends on factors that are invisible to outsiders: the firm's institutional language, the client's political dynamics, the partner's sense of what a winning narrative sounds like.
We are not building a generic tool and hoping it fits consulting. We are building with firms that carry this knowledge — and we want their judgment shaping every decision we make during this phase.
Who this is for
This program is deliberately narrow.
This is for
- Boutique consulting firms — strategy, transformation, or advisory focus
- Teams running RFPs and presales on a regular basis
- Firms where proposal quality is a direct driver of growth
- Partners or engagement leads who own the proposal process end-to-end
This is not for
- Generic slide generation or one-click AI presentations
- Agencies or freelancers looking for mass-market deck tooling
- Teams producing fewer than one proposal a month
- Anyone looking for a polished product with no rough edges
What design partners receive
A real working relationship, not early access in name only.
Direct founder collaboration
Regular working sessions with the founder — not a CSM, not a support ticket queue.
Early platform access
Access to capabilities before they are publicly available, including experimental features.
Influence over product direction
Your use cases, friction points, and priorities shape what we build next.
White-glove onboarding
Hands-on setup support tailored to your firm's proposal process and existing workflow.
Priority access to new capabilities
First in line for research features and new workflow modules as they ship.
Founding price locked permanently
The rate you join at is yours for the life of the relationship — regardless of future pricing changes.
What we ask in return
Not much — but it has to be real.
- Honest product feedback — including what does not work
- Real-world proposal use cases shared with the team
- Periodic iteration sessions with the founder (roughly monthly)
- Openness to collaborative experimentation with early-stage tooling
Current research themes
What we are thinking about.
These are the problems we are actively exploring with design partners. They shape the questions we ask, the features we prioritise, and the hypotheses we test.
We are intentionally working with a very small number of firms during this phase.
From the founder
I have spent a long time thinking about why proposal work is still so hard — not hard in the way that complex work is hard, but hard in the way that fragmented, under-systematised work is hard. The kind of hard that shows up as cognitive overhead, not intellectual challenge.
Most of the difficulty in consulting proposals is not the thinking. It is the mechanics around the thinking: assembling context from ten different places, holding the narrative thread across a week of interrupted work, re-synthesising the same firm knowledge for the seventh time this quarter, formatting slides while the strategic argument is still unresolved.
I believe there is a fundamentally better operating model for this work — one that handles the cognitive infrastructure so the actual thinking can be sharper. Building that model requires working closely with firms that experience this every day and have the judgement to distinguish real improvement from surface-level automation.
If that describes your firm, I would like to work with you.
Apply
Apply to the design partner program.
Takes about five minutes. We review every application personally.