No judgment zone
Assessments Approach
We’ve worked with thousands of engineering and product teams—from start-ups looking to scale, all the way up to established companies with some of the largest Rails codebases in the world like GitHub.
We’ve encountered loads of technical 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.
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
- check if repositories and databases are consistently backed up and ability to efficiently restore from these backups in an emergency
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
- assess 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
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:
- evaluate 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
- identify whether data-driven product decisions are supported by effective, lightweight measurements and if continuous discovery and iterative experimentation are embedded in product processes
