The Engineering Assessment

Two weeks. Every corner of how your team ships. A scored report and a roadmap you keep, whatever you decide to do next.

Why buy this

Something is off in engineering. Releases keep breaking, estimates come back way off (or alarmingly huge), and when you ask why, you get answers you can't evaluate. You could hire another senior engineer and hope. You could bring in a big consultancy and get a hundred slides. Or you could spend two weeks getting a straight, scored, prioritized answer.

That's what this is: a fixed-scope, fixed-price diagnosis of how your team works, and a concrete plan to bring it up to how good teams ship in 2026.

What you walk away with

1. Findings, scored. Every assessment scores the same four dimensions:

• Delivery pipeline: how code actually gets from a laptop to production, and everything slowing that path down.
• Architecture & code health: whether the codebase is helping your team or fighting them.
• Team process: how work gets chosen, sized, tracked, and finished.
• AI-era practices: whether the team is using modern AI tooling deliberately, ignoring it, or improvising dangerously.

The rubric is fixed on purpose. You get findings you can compare, defend, and hand to a board, an exec team, or the engineers themselves, not one consultant's vibes.

2. A prioritized modernization roadmap. Not a wish list. What to fix first, what can wait, and what isn't worth fixing at all, sequenced so the highest-leverage changes come first.

3. A live readout. I walk you through all of it on a call, in plain English, and answer every question. The report is yours to keep and share regardless of what happens next.

How it works

Before we start: a free 30-minute intro call. We check fit, I tell you exactly what access I'll need (read-only repos, CI/CD, your project tracker), and we pick a start date.

Week 1: listen and look. Interviews with leadership and engineers, plus a first pass through your repos, pipelines, boards, and docs. I'm comparing what people say with what the systems show.

Week 2: dig, score, deliver. I chase down what week 1 flagged, score the four dimensions, build the roadmap, and we end with the live readout.

Your team's total time cost: roughly an hour per person interviewed, plus a handful of follow-up questions. An assessment shouldn't halt the work it's assessing.

If something deserves a deeper look

Sometimes the core assessment flags an area that warrants real investigation (a migration risk, a pipeline rebuild, a team structure question) more than a two-week pass can responsibly cover. When that happens, I'll offer an optional two-week deep-dive extension at the readout: same working style, focused on what the core surfaced, with an expanded roadmap to match.

It's never required, and if nothing warrants it, I'll say that too.

Price

$4,500, fixed. The optional extension is +$3,500 ($8,000 all-in for the full four weeks).

The price is published because you shouldn't have to book a call to find out whether this fits your budget.

What this isn't

Implementation. The assessment diagnoses and recommends; executing the roadmap belongs to your team. If you'd rather I stay on and lead the modernization myself, that's a conversation we can have after the readout, but the assessment never obligates you to anything more.

Common questions

Do we have to give you access to our code?

Read-only access, and yes: an assessment of how you ship needs to see how you ship. I'll sign your NDA, or bring a standard mutual one.

Is this remote?

Yes: interviews on video, everything else async. On-site time is possible by arrangement.

What size team does this fit?

The sweet spot is engineering teams of roughly 5–30. Smaller than that, the intro call may solve half of it for free; book one anyway and I'll tell you honestly.

What stacks do you cover?

The four dimensions (pipeline, code health, process, AI practices) are largely stack-agnostic.

We already know what's wrong. Why pay for a diagnosis?

Because knowing what's wrong and knowing how to fix it are different things. You get a priority order, a concrete plan for each finding, and a scored artifact you can share upward; that's usually what's missing between knowing and fixing.

Who sees the report?

You. It's yours to share as widely or narrowly as you want.

Ready?

The intro call is free, thirty minutes, and genuinely exploratory; if the assessment isn't the right tool, I'll say so.