What We Do

Our offerings are purpose-built for early-stage and pre-public growth companies and their venture capital and growth-equity investors.

 

Coaching for Chief Product Officers, Chief Technology Officers, and Sales and Marketing backgrounded CEOs. 

Our clients find our experienced advice helpful,  sometimes as a sounding board, and other times for assistance with a specific people, process, or technology related topic.

Trust-based Team-Effectiveness Facilitation. 

We believe that teams get much more done than groups, but it takes focus and work to become a team and stay a team.

 

Fractional and Interim CPO, CTO, CPTO Leadership. 

When a client experiences either turnover or growth, we step in to provide experienced interim leadership as well as assistance with the search for a permanent leader.  

Product and Technology Due Diligence. 

Whether our clients are investors or strategic acquirers, they benefit from our Product and Engineering expertise as well as our experience and network in Cybersecurity.

 

Product Management and Engineering Process and Measurement Consulting.

We’re old school in some respects in that “you can’t manage what you can’t measure”. That said, measuring the right things and focusing on the initiatives that move the metrics are even more important.  

Board Advisory Services. 

We are available to serve on boards and advise boards on product and engineering strategy, process, team building, exit readiness, and diligence.

Areas of Expertise and Domain Knowledge

Product Management Approaches and Practices.  

  • As former operating executives we have significant experience leading product management at both growth companies and Fortune 500s.   

  • Equally important, we follow other thought leaders in the space and are always looking to incorporate new ideas and approaches into our practices.  For example, Marty Cagan, Silicon Valley Product Group has done a tremendous job describing the true value, responsibility, and potential impact of the product management function. 

  • We are inspired by other smart, capable thought leaders in the space  (Melissa Peri, Teresa Torres, Tony Ulwick, Bob Moesta, Pragmatic Institute, to name a few).  

  • It’s our responsibility to stay on top of all this good thinking and incorporate what we think works best for our clients’ unique contexts.  As a result, we operate like a force multiplier for our clients. 

Software Development Systems and Meaningful Metrics.  

  • In our view “DevOps” or “DevSecOps” is not a function (although in many organizations it has become the new-age Operations), it’s a transformative approach to building and measuring a software development system focused on driving small, timely, chunks of customer-facing value.  

  • We embrace the metrics and capabilities researched and opined on by Nicole Forsgren, Gene Kim, and Jez Humble in their book Accelerate.  Forsgren’s research demonstrated a strong positive correlation between successfully adopting/executing the DORA (DevOps Research and Assessment) core metrics/capabilities and objective business success (high growth, profitability, and market share). So, we have a strong point of view on what to measure and what to do to perform against the measures.  

Team Effectiveness and Culture.  

  • We believe that Teams are more productive and effective than Groups (a bunch of folks that either report to the same person or happen to be working on a project or product together) and are capable of heping our clients build effective teams.  

  • We leverage Patrick Lencioni’s trust-base teaming model as a part of the work we do for our clients.  

  • Additionally, Google’s Aristotle project proved that the distinguishing characteristic of their highest performing development teams was “psychological safety”—we work with our clients to measure and build Generative cultures (Researched and defined by Ron Westrum, PHD Sociologist) which contribute to psychologically safe/highly productive teams.

Although we’re not Cybersecurity experts, we have been product builders, customers of Cybersecurity firms, and held accountability for Cybersecurity in our prior operating roles. Additionally, we have built a significant network of folks who are indeed experts in the field. We leverage our domain knowledge to help our clients build competitive offerings, ask the right questions, and find the right specialized expertise.

Furthermore, we have had both product building and operational accountability for Cloud Cost Management.  As a result, we maintain a network in this important space and monitor thought leaders in the field.