Founding-engineer CRM work means you own the model: clients, tickets, billing touchpoints, and internal workflows have to map cleanly to data the team can audit later. We start from RBAC and activity logs, not as afterthoughts.
Audit trails are product features when ops and compliance need to answer “who changed what, when.” That influences schema: append-friendly event tables, stable actor IDs, and UI that surfaces history without drowning users.
AI chat summaries for long threads are only acceptable with clear boundaries–what gets sent to the model, retention, and how we present confidence. The CRM stays the system of record; summaries are assistive.
Operational transparency is the theme: internal users trust the tool because permissions, tickets, and billing hooks line up with how the business actually runs.
