One journey, five stages, and a person at every gate
Not five products with a shared logo. One line a piece of work travels down, where each stage is refused entry until the previous one is honest, and where the AI drafts everything and decides nothing.
The sentence somebody wrote, kept as they wrote it
A requirement arrives as prose, hedged and ambiguous. AI grills it into typed claims and blocking questions. A person answers them once, and the answers become part of the artifact.
Argue with a draft, not with a blank page
Discovery reads your estate and proposes concepts, grain and join paths, each binding carrying a confidence and a stated reason. Modelling becomes a review, and the review is where the expertise goes.
Generated, not typed
Tables, layer pipelines, jobs and metric definitions all generate from the one model a person approved: Databricks-native, in source format, deterministic from what was agreed.
The gate the lifecycle passes through
Controls bind to the same model, at the moment the meaning is decided rather than months later. The verdict issues the release token, and what it leaves behind is reproducible eighteen months on.
The number arrives with its reasons attached
Lakeview and Power BI outputs generated from the same model, so a figure on a page can still name the claim it answers, the control that held it and the requirement that asked for it.
Start from a requirement someone wrote, or a table you already have.
Design-first works with nothing connected. You can specify, argue about and generate a customer’s data product before anyone hands you credentials, which is when the design still matters most. Discover-first reads the estate you have and drafts the model from it. Both meet at the same stage two.