What we do
We live at the intersection of product, technology, business goals and investor/owner/management team expectations. We work with senior teams, boards, investors, product+tech teams, and acquirers/acquirees. We help you assess what and who you have, what’s working and what’s not - and most importantly - why. We provide you with specific and actionable recommendations for improvement. We coach individuals and workshop with teams. While always respectful, collegial and collaborative, we look for and speak truth. As neutral but knowledgeable advisors whose only agenda is helping you achieve success, we work outside of internal politics and bring independence, clarity and candor to every engagement.
Assessment: “We’re not executing as well as we should, but we’re not entirely sure why.”
How many of these sound familiar?
- Missed deadlines
- Lack of alignment between Product, Tech, Sales and your customers
- Opaque or inconsistent process
- Unstable and ever-changing roadmap
- Tech debt and tech stack issues
- Deliverables missing the mark
- Team friction for the wrong reasons
- Ballooning infrastructure costs
- Unresolved infosec risks
- Hardworking teams but unhappy customers
Younger, smaller companies typically do not have the resources to do this on their own, nor do many of their early-stage investors. If you are a management team, board, investor or other senior leader who sees a problem but needs independent, experienced, unbiased eyes on it, let’s talk.
Due Diligence: “We’re starting an M&A or investment transaction. We need a really solid product+tech evaluation.”
We’ve been through a lot of due diligence exercises. In our experience, the process typically pays significant attention to all things finance, business and client-facing:
- Client rosters
- Sales pipelines
- Revenue and expense actuals and projections
- Cap tables and valuations
- Market sizing and competitor analysis
- The composition of the senior team
- Key partnerships
- Product demos and some roadmap futures
Roadmap, team, organization and process deep dive, tech stack, tech debt, IP protections and competitive barriers to entry, key delivery risks, infosec risks, infrastructure choices and costs, and more.
We’ve lived in this space for years; we know the right questions to ask, the right people to talk to, and the right places to look. It's about giving product+tech equal billing with all else and ensuring all parties have an eyes-wide-open view of the core IP and the people who define it and build it.
Coaching: “We’ve got great people. How can we help them be even more effective?”
Since individual performance and execution is so critical in younger, smaller companies, it’s no surprise that early-stage SaaS companies pay close attention to skills and fit when hiring. Your initial team is often a group of superstars who can move mountains. Unfortunately, scaling that is a difficult exercise and requires constant thought and investment.
As companies grow, the “good problems to have” - and some not so good ones - start to crop up:
- Individual contributors who aren’t well equipped to lead teams, which makes growth messy and turns happy ICs into unhappy managers
- Lack of clarity as to how growing product and tech teams are supposed to work together
- Strong technologists who are increasingly asked to be client-facing or wear Product hats, but lack the communication skills or practice in doing so
- Leads and managers who are left to try to just "figure it out" as things bog down and morale drops
- Senior team inexperience with how to grow product+tech, which leads to “how about you all just be Agile, get some meetings going, and make it so.”
- In a young company, your most valuable asset is not your IP but your people
- Helping good people succeed and grow is one of the most noble endeavors in professional life, and their success directly enables your business’s success
Realignment: “We know we have to make some changes. We need a plan.”
It’s easy to know when things are not going swimmingly. It’s harder to do an accurate assessment to understand why. It’s even harder to know the best way to fix what’s broken when time and resources are tight.
Management teams, boards and investors often scratch their heads and wonder how to right the ship when SaaS products and related services are late, miss the mark, and are too hard or expensive to build, maintain and sell.
Product+Technology teams are often painfully aware of the problems that exist but sometimes do not grasp the full picture, don’t see all of the root causes, and are not empowered or capable of making the necessary course corrections.
Suboptimal process, roadmap, team structure and/or composition, tech stack, and cross-team alignment and workflow can all be direct contributors to failure, but this is almost never untangled and addressed holistically. Attempted solutions are often piecemeal or quick-and-dirty and do not contemplate the interplay of tech, people, process, communication and business alignment across the entirety of the company.
We’re big-picture thinkers, understand all the moving parts, and can provide you with a tailored blueprint for success which unravels complexity, is specific to your particular situation and circumstances, yet incorporates best practices which are time-tested.