In today’s enterprise AI and data projects, 60–70% of initiatives miss deadlines or overshoot budgets (McKinsey, 2024). Because clients increasingly demand faster delivery, broader requirements, and competitive differentiation often without being able to fully articulate what they need.

Add to this the common scenario: the client already has an existing “black box” solution in place. You don’t know its architecture, features, or limitations but your team must deliver something sharper, faster, and more transparent.

Recently, we worked on exactly such a project: a three-month scope compressed into six weeks, vague requirements evolving daily, and constant comparison with an unknown competitor. (Yes! That’s true). The experience pushed us to define a set of nano tips, tiny but strategic moves that helped us align under pressure and ultimately win client praise.

Here are the 9 nano tips we distilled, each backed by how we applied it in practice:

1. Clarify Success Early

When requirements are vague, define what “success” means to the client in concrete terms. We narrowed broad objectives into three deliverables: accurate document extraction, a working QA baseline, and prototype. These became our north star even as requirements shifted.

2. Ruthlessly Prioritize

Not everything can be done. Focus only on what creates the most visible impact. Instead of chasing every feature request, we prioritized only “critical” entities for extraction. This gave the client a measurable outcome while shelving non-essential asks for later.

3. Break the Race into Sprints

Small, visible milestones maintain progress under pressure. We structured the 6–8-week timeline into weekly checkpoints manual document reviews, baseline extractions, prototype rollout, each celebrated as a milestone to keep momentum high.

4. Keep Feedback Loops Short

Frequent check-ins prevent surprises and build trust. Daily syncs were held to transparently share whether each promised action was closed or pending. This open reporting-built confidence with leadership and removed ambiguity.

5. Compete by Differentiation, Not Imitation

Compete by showing unique strengths, not replicating a competitor’s unknown system. Instead of guessing the competitor’s features, we leaned into transparent reporting and adaptability demonstrating exactly how the system worked and where it could flex, something the “black box” could not show.

6. Embrace Manual Rigor Where Needed

Sometimes, hands-on effort outshines automation under constraints. We manually reviewed 100+ contracts and domain documents to verify truth values in LLM outputs. This human validation guaranteed 90% accuracy and won client praise for reliability.

7. Split and Conquer

Divide responsibilities smartly to deliver fast without chaos. One sub-team handled QA baselines, while another built a lightweight RAG prototype. This parallel approach lets us deliver foundations and innovation simultaneously.

8. Show, Don’t Just Tell

Even a basic prototype is more convincing than a polished promise. A lean RAG pipeline was shown as a demo to senior stakeholders, proving capabilities early even before the system was feature rich. This built executive-level confidence.

9. Add Small “Extras”

Delivering tiny surprises creates an outsized impact. Alongside the main deliverables, we added a chatbot query capability that allowed domain-specific Q&A. Though simple, it became a favorite feature, showing we went “beyond requirements.”

This project proved that success under constraints isn’t about brute force it’s about nano strategies: clarifying success, working transparently, dividing smartly, and adding small extras that punch above their weight. With these moves, even black-box competition and crushing timelines can turn into satisfying and great impact.

In this project, we cut processing time from hours to 25–30 seconds per document, achieved 90%+ accuracy on field extraction (95–100% on critical fields), enabled faster sourcing with multi-document comparisons, and delivered structured, auditable outputs validated on 40% of the documents.

Contact Us to access the full case study and see how these nano strategies can create the same impact for you.