Design/Dev Ecosystem Questionnaire

Four Kitchens

This questionnaire helps us map your current design and engineering ecosystem — the stacks, tools, workflows, and in-flight initiatives that shape how work actually gets done at Four Kitchens.

All questions are optional. Answer what you can in as much or as little detail as is useful; skip anything that doesn't apply or that you'd rather cover live. There's no expectation that one person knows every answer — partial responses are genuinely helpful.

Platform & Stack
What does FK build on top of today, and where does each starter sit (active, maintained, deprecated, in flux)?
What's running, and how do you decide when to upgrade?
What's the typical hosting environment, and what drives the choice for a given engagement?
Triggers for going decoupled, and the front-end / API stack you typically use.
How sub-sites are typically structured across the multisite portfolio.
Local Dev & Tooling
What spins up a project, and whether the team standardizes on one tool.
What's actively in use across the team, and where the line falls between team standard and individual choice.
Front-End
What you build components in, and whether there's a shared system or it's per-client.
The canonical front-end stack — and where exceptions tend to happen.
Engineering Practice
How review actually works in practice, not just policy — and where reviewer judgment is doing work that tooling isn't.
Types in use, where the bar sits, where it's discretionary, and where coverage tends to fall off.
The pipeline — from PR through deploy, including what happens when something goes wrong.
Standards & Quality
The a11y bar, how it's enforced, and who owns it.
FK's house rules — what's codified, what's enforced automatically, what lives in people's heads.
Design-to-Engineering
How the handoff feels from engineering's side, the rough edges, and where the work feels ripe for automation.
Operations
What a facelift actually costs in engineering hours, and where the time goes.
Where the 15-hr ceiling reliably isn't enough, and what kind of work spills over when it doesn't.
AI Initiatives
Where the initiative is, where it's going, who's involved — and what feels uncertain.
How the two efforts relate — independent, layered, or converging.
Team Velocity
The tasks that feel like drag — the work engineers do that doesn't feel like the work they should be doing.
Both the time-to-productivity and where the friction lives in the ramp.