Every engagement ends with a prioritised set of actions, the reasoning behind each one, and the outcome it should produce.
Forcompanies whose roadmap has stopped producing outcomes, and investors who want product diligence before committing.
I assess the product, its architecture and the roadmap against the market it competes in. That means reading what you have built, not only what you have planned: where capability is being rebuilt per customer instead of once, where the data model no longer fits what the product does, and where the roadmap reflects the loudest stakeholder rather than the biggest opportunity.
Product, architecture and roadmap against the competitive set. Not a deck.
What to fix and in what order, with the reasoning your team will need to act on it.
With whoever has to act on it, so it gets used rather than filed away.
I read the roadmap and the backlog, but also the architecture, the recent post-mortems, and the tickets that keep getting deferred. Then conversations across product, engineering and whoever sits closest to your customers.
You get a short, ordered list of what is holding you back, and enough reasoning behind each item that your team can debate it properly.
What this is. A diagnosis, not a rebuild. It finds what is constraining you and puts it in order, with the reasoning behind each item. Plenty of teams act on it and need nothing else.
“We already know what is wrong.”
Often true. What is usually missing is agreement on the order, and a line of reasoning that holds up when someone senior pushes back. An audit that confirms what you suspected still earns its fee if it ends the argument.
Forteams at a fork. A new market, a new segment, a competitor move, or a capability everyone assumes you should build.
Strategy work is mostly the discipline of deciding what not to do. I have set a company position on an incoming regulation that concluded we should bring in a partner instead of building it ourselves, and wait rather than move first. It was the right answer and an unpopular one. You get a recommendation with the trade-offs laid out, so it still holds up when it reaches people who were not in the room.
Where the product goes, and what that rules out.
For every option on the table, a call on which of the three, and why.
What it means for the roadmap, the architecture and the sales narrative.
We put the real options on the table, usually three or four, and test each one against what you can actually build, what the market rewards, and what a competitor would do in response. Options that fail on any of those get ruled out explicitly rather than quietly dropped.
You end with a direction: what it rules out, and what each rejected option would have cost you.
“Strategy decks do not survive contact with the roadmap.”
Which is why this one names what it rules out and costs each option in engineering terms. A strategy that cannot be turned into a sequence of work is not finished.
Forteams whose roadmap is a list of requests rather than a sequence of decisions.
Most roadmap consulting hands you a roadmap. It is out of date within a quarter and you are back where you started. What I hand over is the scoring model that generated it, so your team can re-sequence without me next quarter and defend the result to whoever asks. I score work two ways and keep the scores apart: what it is worth commercially, and what it does for customers. One blended number would hide exactly the disagreements you need to see.
The order, and the case for each position in it.
Your team owns it and runs it after I have gone.
With whoever will be running it, so it survives the handover.
I build the scoring model with your team rather than handing one over. You set the weights in a working session, because a model whose weights nobody understands is abandoned by the second quarter.
You set the weights, not me. A model nobody inside the company argued about is a model nobody trusts.
“We have tried scoring frameworks. They get abandoned.”
Usually because someone external built them and the weights were never argued about internally. Your team sets the weights here. I facilitate the argument and write down what you decide.
Forcompanies losing deals they should win, or entering a category that already has incumbents.
A full analysis of the competitive landscape, plus battlecards your team can take into a live deal and an RFP template that plays to your strengths. Most competitive intelligence is a spreadsheet of feature ticks nobody trusts, because nobody can tell which cells are verified and which are guesses. Here every capability score carries a confidence label, so a rep knows exactly how hard to lean on each claim in front of a customer.
Capability scoring with confidence labelling, fact-checked against primary sources.
Built for the deal conversation, and short enough that a rep will read one before the call.
Shaping evaluation criteria toward your architecture rather than toward an incumbent.
Research comes from primary sources: competitor documentation, pricing pages, release notes, review sites, and your own win and loss records if you keep them. Every claim is labelled by how well it is evidenced, so nobody repeats a guess in front of a customer.
Battlecards are built around the three or four moments in a deal where you are actually losing, which is why the win and loss records matter more than the competitor research.
“Our sales team will not use it.”
They will not use a forty-page comparison grid, and they are right not to. What they will use is a page that answers the objection they lost on last week.
The engagement ends at handover, with your team able to carry it forward without me. If something changes afterwards and you want a short call to talk it through, ask. That is not a package I sell; it is just how I would rather leave a piece of work than pretend it needs nothing further.
I take one engagement at a time, so your work has my full attention. Staying in a day job is what keeps the advice current.
Fees are indicative and scoped per engagement. Fixed fee wherever the outcome can be defined up front, hourly at $200 where it cannot. The number in your proposal is the number, and it comes before you commit to anything. Contracting is handled per engagement and covered on the first call.
The engagements above are aimed at product organisations. There is one more that is not: a report for businesses losing hours every week to repetitive manual work, mapping where to automate, what the tools cost, and what order to do it in.
Most teams that need this are losing hours a week to routing emails, updating spreadsheets, copying data between tools, or building the same report every Monday. The report tells you which of it is worth automating first, and what that costs.