Hills or flats, the plan comes first
The single biggest variable in a Sherman Oaks pool project is which side of Ventura Boulevard your house sits on. A hillside lot above the boulevard usually means a sloped yard, limited equipment access, and a shell that has to be engineered to hold back grade as much as it holds water. A flat lot in the streets below usually means room to work but a different challenge: shaping a large open yard so the pool, the deck, and the rest of the outdoor space feel like one designed backyard instead of a pool dropped into a lawn.
We treat those as two different design problems with two different starting points. On a slope we begin with the engineering and the access, because those constraints decide what is even possible before aesthetics enter the picture. On the flats we begin with the layout of the whole yard, because the freedom of a big level lot is wasted if the pool ends up in the wrong corner. Either way the drawing settles all of this before a permit is pulled, so what you approve is what gets built.
Because we build what we draw, the plan is never a wish list we figure out how to honor later. It is a buildable document. We have already accounted for the dig, the soil, the equipment run, and the deck drainage by the time you are looking at the renderings, which is why our projects tend to move steadily instead of stalling out the first time the yard pushes back.