90-Day Plan | VP of Engineering, Aspect Software
The first 90 days focus on tightening reliability, modernizing a hybrid platform (on-prem, hosted, cloud), and giving engineering the operating system to ship faster with less risk. I've led this kind of modernization at scale and know how to balance velocity with stability.
My approach starts with people and outcomes. I align leadership on the most important reliability and growth goals, then give teams the structure, metrics, and paved paths to move faster with confidence.
The 90-Day Plan
Phase 1: Diagnose
Goal: Understand org shape, reliability hotspots, and delivery bottlenecks across on-prem, hosted, and cloud environments.
- Meet engineering managers, tech leads, and key ICs; clarify ownership, decision-making, and pain points.
- Review architecture and CI/CD: how code moves from dev → test → production; release cadence, rollback patterns, and friction.
- Baseline reliability: DORA metrics, p95 latency, incident history, MTTR, paging load, and current SLOs/SLAs.
- Assess observability stack: logging, metrics, tracing, and alerting coverage.
- Map dependencies and risk in hybrid deployments (on-prem, hosted, and cloud).
Output: Baseline of reliability and delivery, prioritized risk list, and a clear picture of team health and leadership gaps.
Phase 2: Design
Goal: Shape a modernization plan that lifts velocity and reliability without destabilizing the business.
- Define or refine trunk-based development, branching strategy, and CI/CD policies (feature flags, canaries, automated rollbacks).
- Propose on-call rotation, SLOs, and incident review process with clear ownership and feedback loops.
- Identify and prioritize modernization workstreams: platform hardening, tech debt reduction, and service / data migration steps.
- Establish "paved paths" for teams: standard repo layout, testing expectations, deployment playbooks, and observability defaults.
- Align with Product on a shared roadmap that balances feature delivery and platform work.
Output: 12–18 month modernization roadmap, 90-day operating playbook, and agreed KPIs for reliability and throughput.
Phase 3: Deliver
Goal: Demonstrate meaningful improvements in reliability, deployment cadence, and team predictability.
- Ship at least one modernization milestone (e.g., improved reliability for a high-traffic service or critical workflow).
- Increase deployment frequency and reduce change failure rate using new CI/CD + feature flag workflow.
- Tighten incident flow: faster detection, clear runbooks, and a measurable drop in repeat issues.
- Introduce AI-powered accelerators where useful (support ticket triage, incident summarization, documentation assists, test generation).
- Coach managers and leads to own the new operating model so it's sustainable, not hero-based.
Output: Two or more visible wins (reliability + speed), modernization roadmap in execution, and a more predictable, trusted engineering org.
Global Teams I've Led
I've managed and partnered with teams across the U.S. and Canada, Latin America, Eastern Europe, India, and beyond. The focus is consistent standards, strong managers, and clear goals so distributed teams move like a single organization.
How I Build and Lead
I've grown and modernized teams across stages—from zero-to-one to multi-team orgs. The playbook blends clear goals, strong managers, a consistent hiring bar, and paved paths that make shipping the default.
Scale
Recruit, coach, and level-up managers; build durable hiring pipelines and operating systems.
Velocity
Ship often with quality through trunk-based development, paved paths, and fast feedback.
Reliability
SLOs, on-call, and clear runbooks so teams can move quickly without sacrificing stability.
Clarity
Shared dashboards and simple processes so engineering, product, and go-to-market teams stay aligned.
What Changes in 90 Days
Deploys per Week
Shift from sporadic, high-risk releases to smaller, safer, more frequent deployments.
Mean Time To Resolution
Faster incident resolution through clearer runbooks, better tooling, and improved on-call processes.
Throughput per Sprint
Cleaner intake and clearer priorities mean more value delivered per sprint.
Platform Modernization
Establishing SLOs and modern CI/CD pipelines across hybrid infrastructure (on-prem, hosted, cloud).
Aspect, let's talk about what's possible in 90 days.
If this plan resonates with where you're trying to take the platform and the team, I'd love to walk you through it live and dive into your specific challenges.
Get in Touch