Documentation,
verified.
PRDs, specifications, test plans and QA reports for hardware and product teams. Every requirement numbered, atomic and testable, drafted fast with an AI-assisted process and the engineering judgment left in.
fixed prices · two revision rounds on the larger work · every requirement testable
Five services, one standard.
Fixed scope, a defined artifact at the end, no open-ended retainers unless you want one. Click any service for the full deliverables, process and FAQ.
60-Minute Documentation Triage Call
Technical Documentation Audit
PRD Writing
QA & Test Documentation
How an engagement runs.
No long onboarding and no account managers. You send what exists, a structured draft comes back, you mark it up.
Send what exists
A spec, a PRD, a Notion page, or a voice note. A few lines is enough to start. NDA signed first, before you share anything.
A draft comes back
An AI-assisted process turns transcripts and fragments into a structured draft in hours. I make every engineering decision and review every requirement.
You mark up, I close out
Two revision rounds on the larger work. Then it is yours: numbered, testable, and ready to hand to a supplier, a customer or an auditor.
Hardware discipline, applied to documents.
In electronics and semiconductors a badly written requirement does not get fixed in the next sprint. It becomes a tooling change, a respin, or a failed certification. That is the standard I bring, whether your product is physical or not.
23 manuals, one semester
A full lab curriculum documented in a single semester with the AI-assisted workflow: 20 embedded-systems exercises and 3 FPGA and edge-AI exercises, each with a complete instructor manual covering objectives, setup, expected results, failure modes and grading. Technical accuracy stayed under my review throughout.
verified workThe costly sentence, found early
Most documentation disputes trace back to one sentence two people read differently, and it is almost always visible before anyone builds anything. Reading a document for that failure is the habit hardware teaches. I bring it to software specs too.
how I readPricing you can check
Every price here sits inside Contra's own published guidance to buyers: technical writing at $30 to $150 an hour, comprehensive documentation projects at $5,000 to $20,000. The arithmetic is the pitch, not the conviction.
fixed pricesPrices, in order.
Artifact-priced, not hourly. Two Quick Hire services to start small, three larger engagements above them.
prices in USD · the triage call is credited against any larger engagement booked within 30 days
PRD and QA booked together is $7,000, not $8,000
Have a document that has to be right?
Book the 60-minute triage call. You get a written note in 24 hours naming the three gaps that will cost you, and what to do first.
Book a triage call founder@raystrat.com- 60-minute working sessionWe go through your actual documentation: the spec, the PRD, the test plan, the handover doc that never got written. I ask the questions your team has stopped asking. No slide deck and no discovery questionnaire.
- One-page triage note within 24 hoursA written summary of what I heard, the three gaps I would close first, and what each one costs you if you leave it. You own the document. It reads without me in the room, so you can send it straight to your team or your investor.
- Recommended next moveA clear statement of what your documentation actually needs next, whether that is a rewrite, a template, a decision nobody has made, or nothing at all. If the answer is "you do not need me," I will say that on the call.
Founders, product leads and engineering managers whose documentation has become the bottleneck. You know something is wrong. You are not sure whether it is the spec, the process, the tool, or a decision nobody has made.
I spent my career in electronics and semiconductors, where a badly written requirement does not get fixed in the next sprint. It becomes a tooling change or a failed certification. That background makes me fast at spotting the sentence in your document that is going to cost somebody money. In software the same ambiguity surfaces at the next release. In hardware it surfaces after tooling.
- You book. Send whatever exists: a spec, a PRD, a Notion page, a voice note. If you have nothing written down, book anyway and we start from the conversation.
- I review before the call, so we do not spend the hour on context.
- We talk for 60 minutes.
- You get the written triage note inside 24 hours.
- A calendar slot overlapping IST business hours, or early and late by arrangement
- Whatever material you can share, ideally 24 hours ahead
Can this turn into a bigger engagement?Yes, and the $295 is credited against it if you book within 30 days.
My product is software, not hardware. Still relevant?Yes. Requirements, testability and traceability are the same discipline in both. I learned it in a setting where getting it wrong meant scrapping physical parts.
Do you sign an NDA?Yes, before you send anything.
- Full markup of your documentI read your spec, PRD, SOP or test plan line by line and mark every gap: undefined terms, untestable requirements, missing tolerances, assumptions stated as facts, and steps no reader could actually follow. Comments go inline, in your tool.
- Gap registerEvery issue found, sorted by what it costs you if it ships uncorrected. Each entry states the gap, where it is, why it matters, and the specific fix. Not "this section is unclear." Instead: "REQ-14 says 'low power' with no number. A supplier will quote against their definition, not yours."
- Rewritten sample sectionI rewrite one section of your choice to the standard I would hold the whole document to, so you see the target rather than read about it.
- 30-minute walkthrough callWe go through the register together, so your team learns the pattern instead of receiving a list they cannot apply next time.
Teams about to send a document to a supplier, a customer, an auditor, or a new hire, and quietly worried it is not ready. Also teams who inherited documentation from someone who left and cannot tell what is still true.
The specific reason your document will cause an argument later, identified before it causes one. Most documentation disputes trace back to a single sentence that two people read differently, and that sentence is almost always visible before anyone builds anything.
- You send the document and tell me who reads it next: supplier, customer, auditor, engineer, new hire. The audience sets the standard.
- Days 1 and 2: I audit and mark up.
- Day 3: you get the gap register and the rewritten section.
- The 30-minute call happens the same week.
- One document up to about 40 pages. Longer is fine, quoted separately.
- Comment or edit access in your tool, or a file I can mark up and return
- One line on who the document is for
What document types do you take?PRDs, functional and technical specifications, standard operating procedures, test and validation plans, onboarding and handover docs, supplier statements of work.
Do you rewrite the whole thing?Not at this price. For the full rewrite, see the PRD Writing service.
What if the document is fine?Then I say so in writing, which is worth something to a team that has been arguing about it for a month.
- Discovery passTwo structured sessions with your technical lead and one with whoever owns the commercial side. I extract the requirements that live in people's heads and have never been written down, which on most projects is the majority of them.
- The PRDProduct definition, user and system requirements, interfaces, constraints, compliance and environmental targets, explicit out-of-scope statements. Every requirement numbered, atomic and testable. Anything that cannot be tested goes into a separate assumptions section instead of pretending to be a requirement.
- Requirements traceability matrixEvery requirement mapped to its source (customer, standard, internal decision) and to the test that will verify it. This is the artifact that makes reviews short.
- Open questions registerThe decisions your team has not made yet, stated plainly, with what each one blocks and who owns it. Handed over rather than buried.
- Two revision roundsYou mark up, I close out. Twice.
Product and engineering teams at the point where the idea is proven and the build has to be specified. Usually before a supplier engagement, a funding milestone, or the first serious customer commitment.
The first version cannot be tested, so a supplier will interpret it against their own definition. The second version can only be passed or failed.
I use an AI-assisted drafting process that turns session transcripts and existing fragments into structured first drafts in hours rather than days. I still make every engineering decision and review every requirement. What the process removes is the typing, which is why two weeks is a date I can hold rather than one I miss quietly.
- Week 1, days 1 to 3: discovery sessions, review of existing material.
- Week 1, days 4 and 5: structured draft, requirements numbered.
- Week 2, days 1 and 2: you review, I collect markup.
- Week 2, days 3 to 5: revisions, traceability matrix, handover call.
- Roughly 4 hours of your technical lead's time across the two weeks
- Any existing material: diagrams, schematics, competitor research, customer emails, old specs
- A named decision-maker who can close open questions
Do you work in our tool?Notion, Confluence, Google Docs, or a DOCX handover. Your choice.
Can you write the test documentation too?Yes. Booked together with the QA and Test Documentation Package, the pair is $7,000 rather than $8,000.
Hardware or software?Both. The hardware work is where the standard came from.
Is $3,500 in range?Contra's own guidance to buyers puts comprehensive technical documentation at $5,000 to $20,000 and basic guides at $1,000 to $5,000. This sits in between, for roughly 35 hours of specialist work.
- Verification planEvery requirement mapped to a verification method: test, analysis, inspection or demonstration. Pass and fail criteria stated numerically before anything runs, so results cannot be argued into passing afterwards.
- Test proceduresStep-by-step procedures someone can run without calling you: setup, equipment, sample size, and exactly what to record. Written to be repeatable by a person who did not design the product.
- Verification and QA reportWhat was verified, how, against what criteria, with what result. Failures documented with the same rigour as passes, including root cause where determinable and the corrective action recommended.
- Coverage and risk statementAn explicit statement of what was not verified and what risk that leaves open. Most reports omit this section. Most customers eventually ask for it.
- Customer-ready summaryA two-page version your client, investor or auditor can read without a technical background.
Teams that have built something and now have to prove it works, to a customer, an auditor, an investor, or their own board. Also teams whose testing happened but was never written up, which is more common than anyone admits.
I write and structure the verification work. Whether I run physical tests depends on your setup and location. Usually your team runs them against my procedures and I own the analysis and the report. We agree that split before you pay anything.
Because a criterion written after the result is not a criterion. Stating the numbers before the test is the only thing that stops a marginal result from becoming a pass by consensus. This is standard practice in hardware verification and startlingly rare everywhere else.
- Week 1: requirements review, verification plan, method selection.
- Week 2: test procedures written, dry run with your team, execution begins.
- Week 3: results analysis, report, coverage statement, handover.
- A requirements document or specification. If you do not have one, start with the PRD Writing service.
- Access to test data, results, or your test engineer
- Agreement on who runs the physical tests, settled before kickoff
Does this cover regulatory certification?I prepare the evidence package and the documentation. Formal certification runs through an accredited body, and I will tell you which one you need.
What if the product fails?You get a report that says so, with the analysis of why. If you need a report that can only conclude pass, hire someone else.
Can you work from testing already done?Yes, and it usually shortens the timeline. Mention it when you inquire.
- Documentation auditWhat exists, what is stale, what is missing, and what is duplicated across three tools with three different version numbers. You get it as a map you can act on, with an owner and a next step against each gap.
- Document architectureThe set of documents your team actually needs, how they relate, who owns each one, and when each gets updated. Sized to your team, not to an aerospace programme.
- Templates and standardsWorking templates for each document type, with the house rules written into the template, so the standard travels without me.
- AI-assisted drafting workflowThe process and prompt library your team uses to turn a conversation into a structured draft. Set up in your tools, loaded with your terminology, taught in working sessions rather than a slide deck.
- Backfill of priority documentsThe two or three documents blocking something right now, written properly during the engagement.
- HandoverA written operating guide so the system runs after I leave. If your team needs me permanently for this to work, I built it wrong.
Product and engineering teams between roughly 5 and 50 people where documentation has become the bottleneck. Symptoms: onboarding takes months, the same question appears in Slack every week, suppliers and customers work from outdated files, and one senior person is the single source of truth for everything.
Not a documentation-as-a-service retainer where I write your documents forever. The engagement has an end. Success is your team producing good documentation without me.
I built a 23-manual technical curriculum in a single semester using this approach: 20 embedded systems lab exercises and 3 FPGA and edge AI exercises, each with a full instructor manual covering objectives, setup, expected results, failure modes and grading. That volume is normally a multi-quarter programme. Content and technical accuracy stayed under my review throughout. Formatting, branding and consistency ran automatically.
- Weeks 1 and 2: audit and architecture. You get the map, the gap list, and the document architecture.
- Weeks 3 and 4: templates built into your tools, workflow trained with your team.
- Month 2 onward: backfill. Priority documents written, your team writing alongside me.
- Final two weeks: handover. Operating guide, final training, exit.
- An executive sponsor who can mandate the new process, because documentation systems die without one
- Access to your current tooling
- Roughly 3 hours per week of your team's time for sessions and review
Why contact for pricing?Because the scope varies more than any other service I offer, and quoting a number before understanding your mess would be guessing. Message me and you will have a figure in one call.
Can we start smaller?Yes. Book the Technical Documentation Audit first and see how I work.
Do you replace our tools?No. I build inside what you already use, unless your tooling is the actual problem, in which case I will say so.
What does month 3 look like?Usually lighter, often paused. I will not bill for a month that does not need me.
- Email founder@raystrat.com with one line on what is stuck.
- I send an NDA and a slot that overlaps your hours.
- Send whatever exists ahead of the call. If nothing is written down, we start from the conversation.