The turnaround starts with one initiative. I help you ship it.
One principal-level engineer, embedded with your team. I bring the firepower to ship what's stuck and the frameworks to make your team permanently faster. End-to-end ownership. No management overhead.
The situation you inherited
You walked into an inherited codebase with no documentation. The architecture decisions were made years ago by people who are gone. Technical debt that nobody quantified is slowing everything down.
The team is capable. That's not the problem. They've been shipping without standards, without a shared process, without anyone connecting the work back to a bigger picture. Morale is fragile. They've seen new leaders come and go before.
There's an initiative on the roadmap that everyone agrees would change things. A design system. An architecture migration. A core workflow rebuild. The team is too buried in day-to-day firefighting to get to it.
Leadership is watching your first 90 to 180 days. They hired you to turn this around. You need to show momentum. Not a plan. Momentum.
You identified the problem. Now you're making the smart move to solve it.
How it works
Discovery call
We map your situation. What did you inherit? What's the highest-leverage initiative? What does leadership need to see in the next 90 days?
Kickoff
I embed with your team and start within the first week. I build the spec, assess the architecture, and begin shipping. There's no separate assessment phase. The diagnostic is built into the work from day one.
Weekly cadence
Strategy call every week to align on priorities. Hands-on development the rest of the week. You get CTO-level thinking plus execution in one seat.
Outcome
The initiative ships. The frameworks stay behind. Your team has standards, a spec-driven process, and more capability than when I arrived.
The methodology underneath all of this is called SpecOS. It's a spec-driven development process I built over years of real engagements. The spec becomes the single source of truth for what the product does and why, written in plain language that both engineers and stakeholders can use. It's what makes the work accountable and what your team inherits when the engagement ends.
What you get
Firepower
The stuck initiative ships. Architecture migration, design system, core workflow rebuild, whatever it is. Production-grade output. Code that holds up when someone else has to maintain it.
Agentic development workflows mean one person delivers at the pace of a small team. You're not waiting on sprints or standups. You're watching the backlog shrink.
Frameworks
A spec-driven development process your team continues using after the engagement. Architecture standards and patterns that make the next hire productive faster. A delivery rhythm the team can sustain on their own.
You're not paying for one initiative. You're paying for the system that makes every initiative after it faster.
Who this is for
This engagement is built for a specific situation:
You're a new Head of Engineering or Head of Product, probably in your first six months. You're at a B2B SaaS company with real revenue and real customers, but the engineering practice hasn't professionalized yet. You inherited a codebase and a team that need standards, structure, and momentum. You need to show leadership tangible progress in the next 90 days.
You have budget authority, or you can champion this with one level of approval.
This is not for:
Pre-revenue startups still figuring out what to build. Start with founder coaching instead.
Companies looking for staff augmentation or ticket-by-ticket task management. I'm not an extra pair of hands. I'm the person who builds the system so your existing hands move faster.
What makes this different
vs. Hiring a contractor
You just got here. You can't afford to spend your first months managing a contractor. I own the initiative end-to-end. The spec-driven process means you have full visibility without being in the weeds. You review the spec, not the code.
vs. Backfilling with headcount
You can't wait 4–6 months. A hire today starts ramping in September. I'm shipping in week one, and I'm building the onboarding infrastructure that makes your next hire productive twice as fast when they arrive.
vs. The agency your predecessor used
I spent 12 years inside agencies. I know exactly why the last engagement produced mediocre results at premium prices. One person, end-to-end ownership, spec-driven accountability. No telephone game. No project managers. No junior devs billed at senior rates.
Results
A new head of engineering inherited an architecture migration that had been sitting in the backlog for 18 months. I shipped it in 8 weeks. It unblocked three features that had been stuck behind it and gave the team its first real win under new leadership.
"Dustin & team make sure to ask the right questions to get to the root of the client's problem before beginning work, which allows them to work quickly and effectively on the biggest pain points."
– Isaac Askew - Ygg
Pricing
This is a flat monthly engagement. No hourly billing. No scope surprises. No change orders.
The investment is a fraction of what you'd spend hiring a principal engineer full-time, with none of the onboarding delay or recruitment risk.
We discuss pricing on the discovery call once we've identified the right initiative and scope.
You have a window. Let's use it.
Book a 30-minute discovery call. We'll talk about what you inherited, where the highest leverage is, and whether this is the right fit.
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