What is a Scalability Audit?

You’ve hit product market fit and you’re ready to scale – is your tech ready to support that?

Transitioning from your MVP to growth can be hard, especially doing it without burning lots of cash and customer goodwill.

We’ll audit your product and the supporting operations and team to identify anything that is going to stop you scaling at the speed you want to. This will give you a plan to scale with confidence – a case of slowing down briefly to speed up again.

What You Can Expect:

  • A deep understanding of your business and your vision
  • Keeping focus on the big picture whilst nailing the fine detail
  • Prioritisation and clear plans
  • A holistic view of tech, team and process
  • Focusing only on what is going to move the business forwards

Our Scalability Audit Includes

Product & Team Audit

We analyse the technical quality of your tech, and capabilities and processes of your team, to identify any barriers to frictionless scaling. You might have a great product team, but they could be held back by inefficient DevOps or poor planning and product management. Our goal is to identify and present solutions to any deep-rooted inefficiencies.

  • Product & Team Audit

    We analyse the technical quality of your tech, and capabilities and processes of your team, to identify any barriers to frictionless scaling. You might have a great product team, but they could be held back by inefficient DevOps or poor planning and product management. Our goal is to identify and present solutions to any deep-rooted inefficiencies.

Processes

To avoid compounding inefficiencies preventing growth, we’ll review and refine key processes like briefing and task management, AI and automation, launch plans and customer communications, and feedback implementation. We’ll keep asking “what would this look like if it was easy” to guide efforts that deliver greater value for the business and its users.

  • Processes

    To avoid compounding inefficiencies preventing growth, we’ll review and refine key processes like briefing and task management, AI and automation, launch plans and customer communications, and feedback implementation. We’ll keep asking “what would this look like if it was easy” to guide efforts that deliver greater value for the business and its users.

People

Reviewing your roadmap and growth plans against your team, we’ll identify skill and capacity gaps before they cause problems, and work with you to resolve them. Our senior expertise can help you to upskill team members, increase coordination between teams, update your org chart and support with hiring and onboarding of technical employees.

  • People

    Reviewing your roadmap and growth plans against your team, we’ll identify skill and capacity gaps before they cause problems, and work with you to resolve them. Our senior expertise can help you to upskill team members, increase coordination between teams, update your org chart and support with hiring and onboarding of technical employees.

Technology

We’ll review your product and its tech to identify issues likely to prevent scaling or cause absurd operational cost increases further down the line. Our goal is to proactively and pragmatically identify the lowest cost, highest impact improvements to prioritise for immediate implementation.

  • Technology

    We’ll review your product and its tech to identify issues likely to prevent scaling or cause absurd operational cost increases further down the line. Our goal is to proactively and pragmatically identify the lowest cost, highest impact improvements to prioritise for immediate implementation.

How it Works

  1. North Star Workshop

    Getting a deep understanding of your vision, business and challenges

    • More Info

      The North Star Workshop creates a shared vision between you and us, avoiding common project pitfalls caused by misaligned expectations. Clients find it helps them discover new perspectives, risks, and opportunities, and unify their team’s vision.

  2. Team, Tech and Process Audit

    Reviewing your existing setup and how this compares to your aspirations

    • More Info

      A focused review of the product, team, and processes to identify growth bottlenecks, guided by the results of the North Star Workshop. This may cover tech or UX issues, team capacity gaps, or weak DevOps or product management. The focus is finding the best way forward, not pointing fingers and assigning blame for historic decisions.

  3. Action Plan

    Create a prioritised plan to resolve issues and move forwards

    • More Info

      We’ll give you a clear plan to identify the issues, their impact and how to resolve them. We’ll also outline ‘quick wins’ to make it easier to focus on bigger issues. The plan will be given to your team, with time set aside for questions and changes to ensure they have everything needed to carry it forward. Our Fractional CTO service can provide extra support.

Ready to talk about your product?

Book a Free Discovery Call

500+
Total Products Built
250k+
Users Supported
20
Years Running
300+
Clients Worked With
200+
Combined years of experience

The Benefits of Scalability Audit

De-risk your growth. The scalability audit will give you a clear view of where you stand, what the potential issues are, and how you can resolve them. This will allow you to continue to grow with confidence, investing in the things that are most important to move you forwards.

We’ll always look for the smallest change that will have the biggest positive impact, creating a pragmatic plan to move forwards – focussing on what is essential for the business.

  • Alignment

    Get your team aligned behind your vision. The North Star Workshop is an opportunity to make sure everyone is on the same page, and identify any differences of direction that need to be resolved – or incorporated into your strategy.

  • De-risk investment

    You know you need to invest to grow, but what is going to give the most return? You could be investing in acquiring customers when you’re not ready to serve that many. The scalability audit will assess potential barriers to growth and prioritise where to invest and what can wait.

  • Accelerate your team

    Getting more from your team will accelerate growth. By tightening systems, creating processes and clarifying roles and objectives you can unblock your product teams to develop and achieve more – potentially avoiding having to make expensive senior hires.

  • Peace of Mind

    Knowing that your product and operations are in a good place allows you to focus on acquiring customers, growing sales and leading the business – not being bogged down in development meetings and day to day firefighting.

How People Feel About Working With Us

5/5
I just love The Tech Dept. I think they’re brilliant. I love them as people. They are really easy to work with. From a charity POV, a lot of private sector companies take advantage of us. We’re easy pickings. They bamboozle us. It’s really nice to have found a company to work with who are on the same page and have our best interest at heart. It’s never felt like a transactional relationship. More like a long-term partnership.
Helen O’Donnell

Children’s University

5/5
The Tech Dept are aware of the pitfalls and things that can go wrong – they’re grounded in reality. You can count on them because they’ve been through the good, the bad and the ugly
Ali Munro

Flutterlab

5/5
The Tech Dept understands our product and what we’re trying to achieve. We have a great working relationship with them. I like that they’re not too techie. They help us solve the problem simply. 'This is the problem; this is how we do it. There’s no rubbish around the side'. In contrast, other dev agencies need us to spell it out. If we don’t get the explanation exactly right, they don’t get it right. So they build the wrong thing.
Clare Baldwin

QHS (Vaccination Track)

5/5
We needed skilled technical expertise and strategic capabilities to help us deliver a number of complex digital projects. We engaged TTD as our “Plug-In Tech Team”, it worked really well. Their devs, strategists and PM joined our internal team and achieved successful delivery across all projects. They’re a brilliant team and we feel lucky to be working with them.
Pippa Irvine

D&AD

Frequently Asked Questions

  • What sort of things might stop me scaling?

    Some examples we’ve seen are – hosting infrastructure that couldn’t cope with increased user numbers, low-code platforms where costs spiral as users increase and teams that lacked process and direction and could never get out of the ‘just do it’ mentality of an early start up.

  • Are you going to recommend we rebuild our tech in your preferred stack?

    No we’re tech agnostic – the tech is just a tool to allow you to do what you want to do. We’d always look first at how you can mitigate any issues with the tech you have.

    The only time we’d recommend rebuilding is if it has real world business benefits for you – that clearly outweigh the effort required.

  • How long does the process take and how much of our time will you need?

    Including the write up the process usually takes two weeks.

    In terms of your commitment we hold a two hour workshop with your founding/leadership team and then a half day session with your product team plus time for follow up questions. 

    We understand that teams are busy and will ensure this is handled efficiently with additional questions answered asynchronously where possible.

  • What experience does the team involved have?

    Scalability Audits are carried out by our senior team who have 60 years experience in tech between them including founding and exiting several businesses. This is in addition to supporting dozens of clients directly, and hundreds of founders via mentoring and support for accelerator programmes.

  • Can you provide support to deliver the recommendations?

    Yes if required we are backed by an experienced product team who can deliver hands-on work and support your in-house team.

    Our first priority in this scenario is to help you get more value out of your team by improving processes, mentoring team members and delivering specialist skills.