The Situation
A PE-backed software company operating three complementary SaaS products had reached an inflection point. A key engineering team had just been offboarded, a new CEO was in seat, and the business was spending $1.55M annually to run its core product at a gross margin 11 points below industry standard.
I led a 30-day commercial, operational, and product diagnostic to test the platform thesis across the three products, quantify where value could be created, and give the operating partner a prioritized go-forward plan. The output was a 50-page diagnostic, but the deliverable that mattered was the investment and operating recommendation behind it.
Challenge
Revenue Concentration
One product drove two thirds of total ecosystem revenue while engineering resources were spread roughly equally across all three.
Pricing and Unit Economics
Packaging did not reflect delivered value, and unit economics on the core product sat well below where the pricing model implied they should.
Integration Cost and Risk
Full consolidation of the three products carried integration cost and technical risk that customer demand did not justify. An ecosystem strategy was the better path.
Infrastructure Cost Leak
$53K per month in EC2 spend with a viable migration path that would reduce cost 20 to 60%. Unidentified and unscoped before the diagnostic.
Technical Debt Compounding
The core product ran on roughly 24 single-tenant instances, each a copy of the last. Every release made the pattern worse.
Knowledge Concentration
Siloed teams held critical product knowledge with no documentation or cross-training, and a former PM who had previously consolidated the product from 100 to 24 instances was available to rehire.
Actions
Platform Thesis Evaluation
Tested consolidation against an ecosystem strategy using pricing, packaging, unit economics, customer demand, and integration cost. Recommended the ecosystem path.
Commercial Diagnostic
Revenue concentration, gross margin gap, and engineering allocation mapped per product, with the case for re-weighting investment toward the revenue driver.
Value-Creation Plan
Product rationalization, technical modernization, strategic partnerships, cost reduction, and potential divestiture of non-core assets, sequenced into 30/60/90-day priorities.
Risk & Talent Findings
Documented an active fraudulent-account exposure with a one-month mitigation path, plus the institutional-knowledge risk and the realistic rehire that could close it.
Results
$544K to $908K annual value-creation potential identified
Identified opportunityQuantified across infrastructure cost reduction and adjacent levers, including a 20 to 60% reduction against $53K per month of EC2 spend. Identified potential, not booked savings.
Platform thesis resolved
Identified opportunityThree-product thesis evaluated and translated into a go-forward value-creation plan rather than a full consolidation program.
Live security exposure surfaced
Realized resultMore than 100 fraudulent accounts created in 48 hours, exposure nobody was tracking, flagged with a defined one-month mitigation path and named ownership.
Technical debt path defined
Identified opportunityThe compounding-debt pattern across 24 single-tenant instances named, with the rehire path that had previously solved the same problem at the same company.
Investment decision enabled
Realized resultThe operating partner moved from no clear view to a sequenced investment and operating recommendation across three products in 30 days.
Jenna is a dynamo with an outstanding track record.