The fastest way to lose a client's trust is to disappear for two months and resurface with something they did not expect. The fastest way to keep it is a steady rhythm of visible progress. Our cadence is built entirely around that.
Work runs in two-week sprints with a clear, written goal for each one. At the end of every week we show a live demo of working software — not slides, not a status report, but the real product running. Even when a week's progress is small, the client sees it, touches it, and can redirect us before a wrong assumption hardens into a month of work.
The discipline that makes this possible is keeping the main branch always shippable. Features land behind flags, tests run on every change, and 'done' means deployed to a staging environment the client can open on their own phone.
This cadence protects both sides. The client is never surprised and always has a steering wheel. The engineers are protected from the thrash of daily check-ins, because the weekly demo is the check-in. Progress is a fact everyone can see, not a promise everyone has to take on faith.