Adam Josephs

When what you are doing cannot afford to fail.

I work with leadership and execution teams on product development, integrations, and high-stakes operational efforts. I work at the level of how commitments are actually made, whether risks are being surfaced early instead of late, and whether the people who own results have genuinely signed up and are prepared to carry the weight of delivery.

The work is not subtle. I get in the room with the people who have to deliver and we make commitments real, reduce late changes, and build the habits that hold under pressure.

The Problem

Most failures do not start with a technical problem.

They start with a risk someone saw but did not raise. A commitment someone made but did not mean. A deadline everyone agreed to but nobody believed.

The result is always the same: changes that should have happened early happen late, when the cost is ten times higher and the options are ten times fewer. The damage is not just schedule. It is market position, integration value, investor confidence, and team credibility.

I work upstream of that failure.

Risk Up Front is built on a simple premise: teams deliver faster and more reliably when risks and commitments are forced into the open early, while there is still time to act.

Three phases. One objective: the team delivers.

Discovery

Short, focused interviews with stakeholders across levels and functions. We find out what is working, what is not, and what people would change if they could. This surfaces the real dynamics, not the ones in the status report.

Workshop

A hands-on session where the team applies Risk Up Front to their actual project. We build shared language around risk, commitment, and accountability. The hard conversations happen here, not in month eight.

Coaching

Ongoing work with the team to make the new practices stick. Individual sessions with leadership and team members, facilitation of critical meetings, and direct engagement where delivery pressure is highest.

People I have worked with.

"Risk Up Front fixed our Agile process and has become a company-wide discipline. Risk conversations now extend from the conference room to the board room."

Matt Little

Chief Product Officer, PKWARE

"Adam shows up and you realize that what you thought is only a tiny fraction of how to do it. He brings a rigorous, well-thought-out process without the typical hair-on-fire chaos that usually comes right at the end of every project."

Dan Case

Head of Platform, Dealerware

"Adam's approach has transformed the way we approach and execute projects. It has improved the way we engage each other on a daily basis by providing a common language that brings individual concerns up front."

John Krog

Strategic Partnerships, SunGard

"We hired Celerity to guide our brand-new software company through defining our product, building it, and releasing it to customers. I do not think our venture would have been successful without him."

Willis Blackburn

Staff Software Engineer, Google

Technology teams where delivery is high-stakes.

I work with leadership and execution teams at companies ranging from startups to business units inside large enterprises. The common thread is a project or initiative that matters enough that missing it has real consequences.

Industries include semiconductors, biotech, financial technology, consumer electronics, and software. The methodology is agnostic to what the team is building. It operates on how the team delivers.

A few words about me.

I have spent my career working with technology organizations on how they deliver. Early on I held leadership roles at Apple, Microsoft, and a number of startups. I have been coaching and advising teams at companies ranging from startups to business units inside Goldman Sachs, Lam Research, and other global enterprises, across semiconductors, biotech, fintech, and software.

I developed the Risk Up Front methodology with my co-author Brad Rubenstein, and it is now taught at Dartmouth Engineering and the University of North Dakota. My academic work has been at Stanford and Oxford's Said Business School.

I work with leadership teams and the people doing the actual delivering, from the executive setting the direction to the engineers and program managers carrying the weight of execution. Some of my most rewarding work has been with early-stage companies building something for the first time and needing to get it right. You do not need to be a large organization to work with me. You need a delivery challenge that matters and a willingness to change how your team operates.