Unlock 2-10x business impact from your software team without adding headcount.
Work with an industry expert to quickly and effectively adopt the benchmark practices of elite-performing teams.
Your team is successful, but has hit a capacity ceiling.
Growth has stalled — not from lack of ambition or market opportunity, but from capacity constraints.
The problem isn't your developers' skill or experience. The problem is how they work, which limits their business impact:
Adding more developers to inefficient processes just multiplies the inefficiency. You need to transform how the team works.
The team members are great. It's the way they work that needs to change.
Elite-performing teams do things differently.
Research shows they deploy 208x more frequently, achieve 106x faster lead times, and maintain 70% better quality than typical performers. This translates to 50% higher market cap growth over 3 years.
They are more efficient and effective with their time, enabling them to deliver significantly more business value with the same headcount. For example, consider three types of teams with different characteristics adopting benchmark practices of elite teams:
The change is dramatic. Revenue-critical features that took months now take weeks. Compliance work that consumed half the capacity becomes routine. Teams have time for product innovation instead of just firefighting.
This isn't theory. It's proven, measurable, and achievable in 6-18 months with your current team.
The challenge is that change is simple, but not easy.
Consider a Formula 1 race: winning is simple — go fast and successfully navigate the track. But doing that consistently requires a lot of skill, years of experience, and total focus.
Similarly, software transformations are simple in theory, but challenging in practice. Success also means going fast and successfully navigating the complexities. Achieving that also requires a lot of skill, years of experience, and total focus.
That's why 70% of transformations fail to deliver all objectives on time and within budget. Here are the three main challenges:
Success requires a breadth and depth of expertise
Software development transformation are cross-functional and span multiple interconnected domains: CI/CD, automated testing, observability, product management, AI-assisted development, security, agile practices, deployment pipelines, and developer workflows. The challenge isn't learning individual practices — those are well-documented. The challenge is orchestrating them, which requires deep expertise across all domains, an understanding of practice dependencies and integration patterns, and transformation leadership experience.
Success requires experience navigating the J-curve
Software development transformations follow a predictable J-curve pattern: productivity temporarily dips 15-30% during months 2-6 as teams invest in building new capabilities. This temporary reduction causes 70% of organizations to abort the transformation before realizing the 5-10x gains—wasting their investment and remaining stuck at current performance levels.
The abort zone is expensive: you've invested months of effort with zero return and remain stuck at baseline performance. Expert guidance provides the measurement framework, practice sequencing, and stakeholder management needed to navigate from the valley at month 4 to 5-10x performance at month 24. The practices are proven—the challenge is maintaining confidence through the dip.
Success requires dedicated time and focus
Even if your team has someone with the right breadth and depth of expertise, they are likely a senior technical leader — already fully occupied with critical delivery work, strategic planning, and keeping the business running. Transformation isn't a side project; it requires dedicated time and focus to succeed.
A structured approach to transforming your software team
A three-phase engagement designed to maximize business impact through improved practices, tools, and team culture. Optional add-ons available for security and compliance integration.
01
Education, Discovery & Roadmap
Engage with the team to document the current level of business impact, understand the need to maximize business impact, learn about the benchmark practices, tools and metrics used by elite-performing teams, identify opportunities for change, and create a transformation roadmap.
Activities:
- 2-10x the Business Impact talk and workshop
- Establish shared knowledge with the team
- Conduct stakeholder and team member surveys
- Analyze existing processes, tools, and workflows
- Benchmark current DORA metrics and developer experience indicators
Deliverables:
- Comprehensive assessment report
- Transformation roadmap
- A fully-engaged software team
02
Implementation and Enablement
Build capability through guided implementation, embedding practices within the team as they integrate and adopt new tools and workflows.
Activities:
- Guided implementation of new practices and tools
- Hands-on workshops and training sessions
- Benchmark new DORA metrics and developer experience indicators
- Ongoing mentoring and coaching
- Minimizing J-curve effects
Deliverables:
- Guidance and training
- Regular progress reports
03
Continuous Improvement
Ensure sustained success by fostering a culture of continuous improvement, providing ongoing support, and facilitating regular reviews and adjustments to practices and tools.
Activities:
- Foster a culture of continuous improvement
- Ongoing mentoring and coaching
- Regular reviews and adjustments
Deliverables:
- Guidance and training
- Regular progress reports
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Security or Compliance Partner
Add to the transformation by integrating best practices from a trusted security or compliance partner to ensure that all new practices, tools, and workflows align with organizational policies and regulatory requirements.
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Security or Compliance Target
Add to the transformation with a specific security or compliance target, such as SOC 2, HIPAA, or GDPR, ensuring that all new practices, tools, and workflows are designed to meet the necessary standards and requirements from the outset.
A track record of inspiring, building and transforming software teams at growing organizations.
Jeremy Bower has over 25 years in technology and product management, including 10+ years as VP and CTO, leading globally-distributed teams at organizations across logistics, healthcare, life sciences, cleantech, fintech, retail, and media—some with US$700 million in revenue. This extensive experience spans strategic leadership and hands-on technical expertise, delivering both transformational change and high-impact technical solutions.
Key accomplishments include building technology teams supporting US$700 million in revenue, leading multiple regulatory compliance initiatives (SOC2, HIPAA, FDA, FCC), and delivering mobile platforms that enabled companies to double revenue in 3 years. The approach focuses on building product technology teams that measure success by outcomes rather than output, which is critical for finding product-market fit, scaling effectively, and driving innovation.
Jeremy's experience and leadership allowed SpeakSuite to quickly scale from a prototype to a secure, reliable, HIPAA-compliant product that is ready to meet the needs of large speech therapy institutions with web and mobile apps, APIs, AI and cloud systems. The software development team is happier and more productive with their new workflow, and customers notice the results.
Recently, we brought all our engineering teams together for an in-person event. Jeremy's keynote talk blended product and tech leadership experience with actionable advice for teams. The ideas were engaging and left a lasting impression. Following the event, we asked our engineers to complete a survey. A majority highlighted the need to increase business impact as a key takeaway.
Jeremy is an exceptional technical leader and working with him was a great experience. He is focused and methodical with deep strategic and tactical skills. His positive and results oriented attitude allowed him to lead an exceptionally productive team as we collaborated on an innovative fintech app with many unknowns.
Working for and with Jeremy was an honor and a pleasure. He is that rare combination: one who is talented at the craft of software development itself, as well as the art of managing other software developers. You don't often get to work with one who's quite so good at either of those things, much less both.
Estimate the business impact and ROI of transforming your team.
Step 1: Allocate your team's software development activity across the categories below. If an activity doesn't usually happen weekly, then estimate the average time spent per week over a longer period (e.g., monthly, quarterly or annually).
Building new features or maintaining existing code. Typical range: 30-40%
Manual and automated testing. Typical range: 15-25%
Investigating, diagnosing, and resolving bugs, and related support. Typical range: 20-35%
Sprint planning, standups, reviews, and team collaboration. Typical range: 15-25%
Managing QA/staging environments, manual steps, etc. Typical range: 5-20%
Documentation, tooling and other activities. Typical range: 0-10%
⚠ Total of all software development activities is .%
Step 2: Enter your team's size and average fully-loaded cost per developer. The fully-loaded cost should include salary, benefits, taxes, and overhead.
Typical range: 5-50 developers
⚠ Team size must be 1 or greater.
Typical range: $100,000-$300,000
⚠ Average fully-loaded cost must be $10,000 or greater.
Transforming your team of could provide the equivalent business impact of a team of while avoiding in costs per year for a one-time investment of , which includes of your team's time () and consulting fees (). The annualized ROI is around , and pays for itself in about of cost avoidance. Additional tools may be required depending on your team's specific needs. Transformations can take up to months to complete, but business impact typically starts to increase after only a few months.
| LOW | MID | HIGH | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Business Impact | |||
| Annual Cost Avoided | |||
| ROI (Annualized) | |||
| Payback Period |