What we're looking at, and why.

Most engineering "health checks" measure one thing — deploy frequency, or NPS, or velocity — and miss everything else. A team can ship daily and still have a compliance gap that ends a deal. A team can have great morale and zero ability to roll back. We score four lenses separately so you can see the shape of the risk, not just the average.

Self-reported, by design. This diagnostic is attestation — your honest read of your own organization — and that's a real signal: it starts the right conversation, and it's free because honesty does most of the work. What attestation can't do is verify itself. That's observation — first and mostly the human kind: being in the room while work happens, watching who speaks, who defers, and what goes unsaid. No system reveals that layer, and it's usually where the gap between the deck and delivery lives. Toolchain evidence can round out the picture where it's useful. An engagement picks up there, if the result warrants one. Trust the self-read; verify in the room.

Overall HealthRetention, on-call burden, knowledge spread, hiring posture
Compliance EvidenceAccess controls, change trail, audit readiness, vendor inventory
AI Risk PostureShadow AI, data classification, output validation, vendor clauses
Deployment RiskFrequency, lead time, change failure rate, MTTR, rollback

Answer the questions above — your scores will appear here as you go. The full read renders once each lens has at least one answer.

How to use this honestly.

  1. Score what's real, not what's aspirational. If your access reviews happen "when we remember", that's a 1, not a 3 because you have a Notion page about doing them.
  2. Run it twice if it's a team conversation. Once with the engineering lead's view, once with the founder or COO view. Where the scores diverge is more interesting than where they agree.
  3. Don't average across lenses. An 80 in Overall Health doesn't compensate for a 30 in Compliance — auditors and customers don't care about your average.
  4. The lowest single answer is usually the right place to start. Not the lowest lens. The lowest individual question. That's the next move.

Want an experienced outside read on what came back?

30 minutes, free, no slides. Send us your scores or just walk us through the worst lens — we'll talk through what's actually fixable in the next 90 days and what needs senior technical leadership in the room.

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