overview / 01-1KE / 04-designing-the-solution
Stage 3 · Designing the Solution
Last updated at 2026-06-15 18:09 AEST.
With a strategy approved, 1KE moves from "what we'll recommend" to "how it would actually work." This stage is the engineering design step. It produces the technical substance of the deal — the architecture, a read of the customer's current setup, a plain walkthrough of the proposed solution, and the diagrams that make it all clear — before a single page of the proposal is written.
The simplest way to think about it
This is the architect at the drawing board. Given the agreed direction, they work out the components, how they connect, the key technical decisions, and the risks — and they sketch the diagrams a customer would actually want to see. 1KE does this design work as its own deliberate stage so you can review and refine the engineering before committing to a full proposal.
What goes in
- The approved strategy from the previous stage — the agreed services, products, and partners.
- The deal's full understanding — requirements, environment, and constraints.
- Optional steering notes, if your team wants to nudge the design in a particular direction.
What comes out
A complete solution design, made up of a few connected pieces:
A structured design of the solution — its components, how they integrate, the key technical decisions and why they were made, security controls, compliance mappings, and the packages of professional-services work needed to deliver it.
A written read of the customer's existing landscape — their technology, the gaps and pain points, and the integration points that matter — so the proposed solution is framed against where they are today.
A clear walkthrough of the proposed architecture and how it meets the requirements — the section a reader turns to for "what are we actually getting?"
Real, rendered diagrams of the solution, drawn from the design and embedded directly into the overview — not rough sketches, but presentation-ready images.
Why design is its own stage
It would be possible to design the solution and write the proposal in one giant step. 1KE deliberately separates them, for two reasons:
- You can review the engineering first. The design is something your technical people can inspect and iterate on before the platform spends effort writing a full proposal around it.
- The proposal and the design can never disagree. Because the design is built and saved once here, the proposal stage simply reuses it. The architecture in the diagram always matches the architecture in the words — they can't drift apart.
Built-in safeguards
A single structured design is produced first, and everything else — the diagrams, the overview — is built from that one design rather than re-invented, so the pieces stay consistent.
Rendered diagram images are saved into your organisation's own private storage, so the picture embedded in a proposal stays intact and never expires or goes missing.
The design records which version of the deal understanding it was based on, so the platform can later tell you if newer information has moved past the saved design.
Everything stays inside your organisation, updates appear on screen in real time, and each run is saved as a new version you can review or roll back.
What comes next
With the solution designed and the diagrams rendered, the platform has all the raw material it needs to write the proposal — the customer's needs, the agreed strategy, and now the full technical design. The final stage assembles it into a finished document.
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