No judgment zone
Assessments Approach
We’ve worked with thousands of engineering and product teams—from scaling start-ups to pre-IPO mid-size companies to enterprise.
We’ve encountered loads of technical, product, and human challenges—including some seriously scary stuff! We translate that expertise into practical assessments to help you uncover root causes.
No judgment. Just areas for improvement to help your team do their best work. Assessments are available as a full assessment across all areas or targeted to the specific area that needs the most attention.
Scalable infrastructure
Infrastructure & Security Assessment
As your company and systems grow, scaling challenges and risk management are critical to manage. We’ll help you 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
- examine processes for getting features into production, attempting to minimize waste and leverage automation wherever possible
Maintainable systems
Software System Assessment
We help teams keep their codebases and systems maintainable and scalable—even as they grow and evolve. That includes understanding 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
- examine operational risks, such as system's ability to handle increased loads without incurring high costs or failing
- identify ability to deploy changes to production consistently with minimal downtime and manual effort
- 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 are impacted by the maturity level in 4 key dimensions: strategy, discovery, delivery, and culture. We’ll provide a realistic view of the current product model challenges and opportunities:
- evaluate product vision, strategic alignment with business goals, and prioritization frameworks to provide a recommendations roadmap leaders and teams can immediately implement for improvement
- analyze user research, market analysis, and validation processes to uncover opportunities for product performance turn-around
- examine development methodologies, release cycles, and performance metrics to understand potential systemic and cultural factors that may influence team performance
- assess team collaboration, communication, and skill sets—within product team and with stakeholders—to identify gaps for targeted improvement
Sustainable processes
Teams & Org Assessment
With growth comes growing pains, and it helps to be ready to tackle the transitional stages. We’ll identify potential areas for improvement based on what we’ve seen work with similar teams:
- identify if team has the right people with the necessary skills and experience, and if critical knowledge is shared to prevent disruptions if key individuals leave
- assess team morale, retention likelihood, the reasons people stay, patterns in communication, and collaboration within and across teams, as well as with stakeholders
- examine whether data-driven product decisions are supported by effective, lightweight measurements and if continuous discovery and iterative experimentation are embedded in product processes
- evaluate the effectiveness of collaboration and communication among teams, surfacing process challenges that are causing inefficiencies
ANALYZE RISK & OPPORTUNITY
Due Diligence Assessments
Private equity and venture capital firms require a different assessment lens when considering a software product company acquisition.
We apply each of the core assessment areas to help your firm analyze both risks and opportunities.
Understand what the current state is, validate product-market fit, and know what it will take to improve performance and scale.