The Engineering Assessment
In two to three weeks you know what is slowing your team down and what to do about it.
- Length
- Two to three weeks
- Price
- Fixed, agreed up front
- You receive
- Report, readout, 90-day plan
- How work gets from idea to production
- Code and architecture health
- Hosting, reliability and running costs
- Team structure, morale and key-person risk
- Where AI helps and where it adds defects
- Security and compliance gaps
- What to fix first and what to leave alone
- Budget and staffing for 90 days
I work alongside your team and review the system, not the people. The report is in plain English, and the 90-day plan is yours to use with or without me.
Who it is for
- Business owners who want AI to help and need someone to find where it pays off.
- People with an app to build who don’t know where to start.
- Owners and CEOs whose software team is busy and not shipping.
- Leaders who bought AI tools and saw no change, or more defects.
- Acquirers and investors who need to know what they are buying before they sign. If that is you, you inherited a codebase covers what I look for.
How it works
Week 1. I get read access to code, infrastructure and tickets, and talk to you and the team.
Week 2. I follow real changes through your delivery process and measure where the time goes.
Week 3. You get the written report and a readout. Acquirers also get a version for the investment memo.
What happens next
Afterwards I can stay on to carry out the plan with your team, through weekly working sessions, code review and coaching for your leads. That work is month to month. If you have heard it called a fractional CTO, this is the hands-on version: what that costs and how it compares to an agency or a hire.
Interim engineering leadership is available on a limited basis.
Why me
Twenty years building software and leading engineering teams. Nine of them were at Tucows, where I went from team lead to Director of Engineering on the platforms behind Hover, OpenSRS and Wavelo. I still ship production software myself, using AI agents, including Wakefully and Turnstile Stubs.
Check out the principles I work by, or what people I have worked with say.