No judgment zone
Assessments Approach
We’ve worked with thousands of engineering and product teams across every stage. Common technical, product, and human challenges consistently emerge. We translate expertise and pattern matching into practical assessments to uncover root causes.
No blame. Just tangible priorities to help your team with clarity, alignment, and confidence to do their best work and implement improvements.
Assessments are available targeted to any of infrastructure, software systems, and product—or as an integrated assessment across all three areas.
Scalable infrastructure
Infrastructure & Security Assessment
As your company and systems grow, scaling challenges and risk management are critical to manage. Are you paying for cloud resources you're not actually using? Will your system stay responsive if you hit 10x current user volume? How confident are you that data practices meet compliance requirements?
Spot gaps so they can be addressed as you plan for the future. We focus on several key areas to identify potential improvements:
- evaluate scalability and ability to maintain high uptime/performance as user base grows
- assess security risks, ensure up-to-date data storage/practices, and API keys/secrets managed correctly
- right-size the cloud infrastructure of the business to ensure no dollars are wasted on over-engineering
- evaluate deployment pipelines and infrastructure automation for reliability and efficiency
Maintainable systems
Software Systems Assessment
We help teams keep their codebases and systems maintainable and scalable—even as they grow and evolve. Can current architecture handle planned growth? Are you building technical debt faster than you can pay it down? How much time are you wasting on manual deployment processes?
Understand opportunities to extend and scale systems with modern technology, and helping you identify where to get started:
- determine if system architecture and code design allow easy maintenance by skilled developers in relevant tech stacks
- identify operational risks, such as system's ability to handle increased loads without incurring high costs or failing
- examine processes for getting features into production, with the goal to minimize waste and use automation whenever possible
- evaluate quality of documentation, test suites, and automation to ensure new developers can quickly and confidently make changes
product operating model
Product Assessment
Product organizations frequently face friction from unclear priorities, misaligned teams, and ineffective processes across strategy, discovery, delivery, and culture. Are you building features that actually move business metrics that matter? How do you decide what to build next when everything feels urgent?
Receive a realistic view of the current product operating model challenges and opportunities:
- evaluate product vision, strategic alignment with business goals, and prioritization frameworks to create an actionable, aligned roadmap
- analyze user research, market analysis, and validation processes to prioritize opportunities that significantly improve product outcomes
- examine development processes, cycles, and metrics for systemic and cultural friction points, and align on actions to boost effectiveness
- assess team collaboration, communication, and skill sets to provide clear recommendations that directly address the most impactful gaps
Managed risk
Due Diligence Assessment
Private equity and venture capital firms require a different assessment lens when considering a software product company acquisition. Is the company's growth real or are they just riding a market wave that could end? How defensible is their product advantage? Can this product scale to the revenue multiples you need for your exit strategy?
Overlooked risks can significantly erode value post-acquisition: technical debt, org friction, fragile market positioning, competitive threats.
Our due diligence assessments for PE and VC firms combine technical, product, and organizational expertise to identify risks and validate required improvements to get the most out of your investment:
- strengthen product-market fit
- address operational bottlenecks
- mitigate competitive risks
- accelerate sustainable growth