Rubric engagements are deliberately structured for organisations that need senior judgement quickly and honestly. Same shape on every engagement: a clear scope, a written recommendation, a defined handover.
Rubric takes on short, bounded engagements where an organisation needs an experienced perspective on a call that would be costly to get wrong. Data platform selection. Cloud and infrastructure cost reviews. AI implementation guidance for small teams. Pre-close technical assessments. Right-sizing infrastructure that has quietly outgrown its need.
The work is diagnostic and prescriptive. Time inside the tooling, the data, the bills, the runtime metrics and the stack as it actually runs. Conversations with the engineers, product, finance or the board when talking to them changes the answer. Then a written assessment with concrete recommendations you can act on. Judgement, direction, and a clear view on what to do next.
For investors evaluating a target, acquirers planning an integration, or leadership teams combining two organisations. A senior technical assessment on where the two stacks converge cleanly, where the migration cost gets underestimated, and where the "same category" assumption on a diligence questionnaire hides a multi-quarter engineering project.
Categories that look interchangeable on paper and behave nothing like each other in production: Analytics Platforms, Data Warehouses and Data Lakes, Product Analytics and Customer Data Platforms, Observability and Incident Response, Ticketing and Workflow Tools, Cloud Deployments, Identity Solutions, and SaaS Portfolios where three tools quietly cover the same functional territory. Each carries a specific integration mechanic and a specific migration cost that a non-technical dealmaker cannot see from the outside.
Delivered as a written memo inside the deal timeline. Executive summary the investment committee will actually finish, technical detail the acquiring engineering team can use in the first ninety days. Same voice as every other Rubric engagement: senior operator, plain English, named risks and named trade-offs.
Most engagements land inside four weeks. Longer ones are a deliberate choice, scoped to the complexity of the work, not a drift.
Opening conversation, direct with the advisor. Sometimes there is a clear question on the table. More often there is a symptom, a decision looming, or a sense that something is off. We work through it together and land on what the engagement is actually for, the shape of the deliverable, and the fee, before any billable work begins.
We build the assessment the situation calls for. That can be architecture documents, cloud and cost data, runtime metrics, code, contracts, roadmaps, org charts. It can include conversations with engineers, product, finance, or the board, when talking to them changes the answer. What we look at is scoped to the question, not a fixed checklist.
A short document, in plain English. What we think is really going on. What to do, what to stop, what order to do it in. Named risks, named trade-offs, quantified where the numbers matter. Delivered inside four weeks on most engagements. When the situation genuinely needs longer, we say so up front and scope accordingly.
Your team executes. We stay available for a defined window to answer questions and pressure-test decisions as you act on the recommendations.
Every engagement starts with a direct conversation. In that call, we walk through relevant prior work at whatever level of detail you would find useful, and we can arrange references from senior operators who have engaged the practice on similar questions. Trust is built before the engagement letter, not after.
Most of a written assessment gets produced remotely, with video interviews and shared access to systems and dashboards. When on-site time is genuinely useful, whether that is a two-day working session with the engineering leadership, an executive presentation, or a portfolio-company visit, we do it. On-site work carries actual travel, lodging and per-diem expenses at cost, agreed in advance and separate from the engagement fee.
Rubric works from a hardened, encrypted laptop as standard. For engagements where your security posture requires it, whether that is a regulated industry, a PE portfolio company with SOC 2 obligations, or an organisation with strict device-management policies, we work on client-provided and client-managed hardware for the duration of the engagement. The choice is yours.
The default cadence for a two-to-four-week written assessment is a full-time focus by Rubric on the work. For longer advisory relationships, fractional CTO seats, or an ongoing second-opinion arrangement, we scope to whatever cadence the situation actually needs. Some months are a standing weekly call. Some are two days on-site and nothing in between. The engagement letter names the shape.
Rubric is a US-based practice. Every engagement is delivered by a senior advisor directly. No offshore team, no outsourced research pool, no analyst layer producing sections of a memo that the client never meets. The fee reflects the advisor's time, not a margin on other people's hours.
Real product, real customers, a technology call on the table that the internal team is close to but has no one senior enough to sign off on with confidence. A fractional CTO conversation without the retainer commitment.
The team is capable but nobody in the seat has taken decisions of this scale before. A written point of view from someone who has been through this before is worth more than another two junior hires.
Real technology budgets, real growth pressure, no senior technical advisor on the roster. Often facing decisions like a data warehouse, a cloud migration, an AI programme or a platform consolidation. Wary of being over-sold by vendors.
Portfolio companies needing technology due diligence, a post-close assessment of the platform, or a targeted cost review that a senior operator can turn around in weeks, not months.
A short note is enough to begin. The first conversation is with the advisor directly, at no cost.