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Restoring Velocity at Fintech Startup
From zero ships in 4 months to weekly production cycles.
01. The Mess
The team was bloated with 12 engineers but had no clear roadmap. The founder was spending 20 hours a week in JIRA, and features were stuck in 'code review' for weeks.
02. The Surgery
I cut the roadmap by 70%, identifying the 2 features that actually mattered for the Series B raise. I removed 3 redundant layers of sign-off and instituted a 'ship on Friday' hard rule.
03. The Cadence
By week 8, the team was shipping every Friday. The founder was removed from daily standups, only reviewing the Sunday night demo recording.
Founder Context
"This wasn't a product failure; it was a founder-bandwidth failure. By fixing the execution layer, the founder was able to focus on the fundraise rather than bug triage."