Specifiability — Vol. I, MMXXVI · A specification of record

Specifiability

Specifiability is where enterprise software is specified before it is built.

Software is increasingly written by agents.

The agents are good. They are getting better quickly. What they need from us, what they have always needed, and what humans used to provide quietly through proximity and shared context, is a clear specification of what should be built and why.

I. What is written is not enough.

Most enterprises do not yet have a specification of record. They have tickets, design files, slack threads, and the working memory of the people who have been there longest. These were sufficient when humans interpreted the gaps. Agents do not interpret gaps. Agents interpret what is written, and what is written today is not enough.

II. The execution layer needs a counterpart.

The agents are the execution layer. Specifiability is the specification-of-record and quality layer.

III. A single coherent artifact.

We are building the platform that lets enterprise R&D organisations specify, govern, and verify what gets built in the age of AI agents. A place where features, design, components, and acceptance criteria become a single coherent artifact. A place where decisions made in the room are absorbed into the record, where disagreements are surfaced before code is written, where the time between meetings stops being where the work goes to die.

IV. For companies that take their work seriously.

We are building this for the kind of company that takes its work seriously. Companies whose products carry a brand, a craft, a long arc. Companies for whom the difference between attention and surveillance, between being known and being served, between what shipped and what was meant, is not a marketing subtlety but the substance of what they make.

Who stands behind

The company is founded and led by Robert Kristiansen, a serial founder with a prior category-leader exit in European accounting automation.

The decade spent building the previous category leader gave the deepest lesson on what enterprise software actually sells: customers believe they are buying automation, but what they pay for is governance and control over a domain where governance was previously absent. Specifiability applies the same lesson to a new and significantly larger domain — the making of enterprise software itself.

Robert was also the founder of what is today Kongsberg Digital India, a software development hub that now counts close to four hundred engineers.

How we work — four commitments

  1. Specification of record. A single, durable artifact that says what is to be built and why — readable by humans and agents alike.
  2. Governance. Decisions, trade-offs, and constraints captured at the moment they are made, not reconstructed afterwards.
  3. Verification. Acceptance criteria written before code, used continuously to confirm what shipped is what was meant.
  4. Shared context. The proximity that used to live in a room, made explicit so distributed teams and agents can work from the same ground.

Based in Europe. Building for enterprises everywhere. Working with a small number of founding design partners, and quiet on purpose.

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Contact: hello@specifiability.com