I'm not an architect. I'm a software engineer, and for a long time that felt like a strange qualification for building a product architects would trust.
But I grew up around property development. Buying, renovating, moving on to the next site, it was just how my family worked, and by the time I bought my own first home, it wasn't a starter flat, it was a full renovation project I ran myself. That put me in a lot of rooms with a lot of architects over the years, watching how their projects actually ran, not how a brochure said they should.
What I kept noticing wasn't the design work. Architects are good at that, it's what they trained for. It was everything around it: the enquiry that turns into a site visit before anyone's confirmed the budget, the brief that lives across a notepad and three email threads, the sign-off nobody can actually point to when a client says "but we agreed that."
I could see the shape of a better system. What I couldn't do on my own was know whether it was actually right, because I'd only ever seen this from the client's side of the table.
Meeting Kevin
I met Kevin Crawford through a local networking group over ten years ago. Since then, I'd worked with Crawford Architecture, the practice his father John founded in 1987 and that Kevin has run for more than twenty years.
Around three years ago, Kevin asked me a question that became the whole company: could we build something that genuinely helps architectural practices run better? Not another generic form tool bolted onto the profession from outside, something built by people who actually understood how a practice works.
That conversation is Pilotis. My job was making sure the software held up. Kevin's was making sure it earned its place, that every feature answered a real problem a practice actually has, not one a spec sheet imagined.
Why start with the brief
Under the RIBA Plan of Work, Stage 1 is literally called Preparation and Brief. It's the foundation everything downstream sits on: cost, scope, the confusion that shows up eight months later. And most practices are still capturing it the way they did in 2005.
Pilotis Forms is our answer to that. Structured capture across the four moments that matter most: initial enquiry, developed brief, specification choices, and completion, with every decision recorded and every sign-off somewhere both sides can actually see.
What it means day to day
The value isn't a single dramatic number, it's the fee-earning hours you get back before a site visit even happens, and the back-and-forth that never happens because there's a record instead of a memory. As we get more data from practices using it live, we'll share real figures rather than ask you to take our word for it.
What's next
Pilotis Forms is the first product in a wider suite, already proven with the practices using it since early access. Kevin's side of this story covers twenty years inside a practice, and why he thinks this is the tool he wishes he'd had.
If you're running a practice and any of this sounds familiar, you can see what we've built on the Solutions Page.
