For PE operating partners and portfolio leadership
An 8-week structured pilot with your product teams designed to surface attrition drivers, identify manager risk, and produce board-ready evidence of improvement. Success criteria are agreed before week one begins, so the week eight readout is a verdict, not a conversation.
Typical attrition cost — one senior IC departure
Recruiting and search fees
20% of salary, $180k base
Onboarding and ramp time
6 to 9 months to full productivity
Senior IC drag cost
Informal carrying of new hire
Knowledge and velocity loss
Institutional context, sprint capacity
Total cost per departure
$172k+
This figure excludes team morale contagion and sprint capacity disruption, both of which compound the real cost further.
You can see attrition in the P and L. The signal of who is driving it, which teams are at risk, and how your frontline managers are affecting the talent that drives valuation lives below the surface of what standard reporting captures.
70%
of voluntary departures trace back to direct manager behavior. Compensation and market conditions account for the remainder.
1.5 to 2x
salary is the benchmark cost per departure for a senior IC. Most portfolio finance teams undercount the real figure by 40 to 60%.
Q+2
is the typical reporting delay. By the time attrition appears in board reporting, the damage is two quarters old.
Most interventions draw on surveys and retrospectives. This pilot captures behavioral patterns across real interactions, patterns that emerge from observed evidence rather than recalled experience.
System one
The pilot examines how your organization is structured to support effective work. How decisions move, how roles are defined, how accountability is distributed, and where friction has been built into the system by design or accreted over time.
System two
Behavioral patterns are observed across real interactions. The system captures how people communicate, escalate, defer, and collaborate so that patterns emerge from evidence, grounded in what was actually said and done across each sprint.
Together these two systems produce a view of your organization that goes beyond what surveys, reviews, and retrospectives reach. Patterns seen across time, across roles, and across the full texture of daily work.
Product teams run on 2-week sprints. The pilot aligns to that rhythm so data collection is invisible, retrospectives become evidence moments, and nothing disrupts delivery.
Week 1
Baseline
Lock metrics. Pre-agree success criteria with leadership. Manager assessment begins.
Weeks 2 to 3
Sprint 1
Manager instruction begins. IC support channel opens. Initial behavioral signal captured.
Weeks 4 to 5
Sprint 2
Patterns tested for consistency. Structured practice introduced. Second observation confirms or reorients the first.
Weeks 6 to 7
Sprint 3
Three-sprint trend line established. Manager heatmap complete. Board narrative drafted.
Week 8
Signal
Post-pilot readout. Annualized projections. Criteria reviewed together.
Week 1
Baseline
Lock metrics. Pre-agree success criteria with leadership. Manager assessment begins.
Weeks 2 to 3
Sprint 1
Manager instruction begins. IC support channel opens. Initial behavioral signal captured.
Weeks 4 to 5
Sprint 2
Patterns tested for consistency. Structured practice introduced. Second observation confirms or reorients the first.
Weeks 6 to 7
Sprint 3
Three-sprint trend line established. Manager heatmap complete. Board narrative drafted.
Week 8
Signal
Post-pilot readout. Annualized projections. Criteria reviewed together.
The pilot runs a structured development sequence built around what the diagnostics reveal about each manager's specific gaps. Every element is drawn from what the data shows about your organization, so the work lands as directly relevant rather than broadly applicable.
Week 1
Managers complete a structured leadership assessment. Results identify specific skill gaps across psychological safety, feedback delivery, conflict navigation, and decision clarity. This baseline shapes the curriculum.
Weeks 2 to 3
Each week, managers receive instruction tied directly to their diagnostic results. If the assessment surfaces difficulty with ambiguity or with delivering feedback that lands well, those are the skills addressed. Every session is specific to what the data showed.
Weeks 3 to 5
Each lesson is paired with a scenario drawn from the dynamics already observed in your organization. Managers practice new skills in conditions that reflect their actual environment, built from real patterns rather than generic case studies.
Week 6
The final week connects the curriculum to broader organizational patterns identified through the diagnostic layer. Managers receive a summary of what shifted, what remains, and what continued development would address.
Every pilot includes structured sentiment capture at the start and close of the engagement. Participants respond to the same dimensions so the shift is visible, scored, and comparable across the full arc.
These are the benchmarks used to evaluate whether the pilot delivered what it was designed to deliver. They are agreed with you before week one starts so the week eight readout is a shared assessment against shared criteria.
Leadership Development
Team Dynamics
Organizational Signal
The same standard you would apply to any operational claim. A single sprint of improvement is an anecdote. Two is a correlation. Three is a data set, the minimum threshold for a trend line you can put in front of a board or LP and have it hold up on methodology.
01
Sprint 1
A promising first signal. Useful for orientation. The kind of result that generates questions in the room, which is exactly what the second sprint is designed to answer.
Anecdote
02
Sprint 2
Pattern holds without the novelty effect. Now you have two observations pointing the same direction.
Correlation
03
Sprint 3
Three consistent observations produce a trend line with an annualized projection. This is the evidence standard that holds up in a board room.
Trend
The same pilot produces different evidence packages for different stakeholders. We prepare all three so you walk in with the right framing already done.
Framing
Every attrition event is translated to a dollar figure using a methodology you pre-approve. The pilot result becomes a cost avoidance number attached to a margin improvement projection.
Manager risk is presented as operational risk, named, tiered, and paired with a development plan. It arrives as actionable intelligence with a cost model attached.
The close: this pilot is a proof model. Expanding to all product teams costs X and projects Y in attrition cost reduction by Q4.
Primary metric
Cost avoidance
Attrition reduction times fully-loaded departure cost
Risk metric
Manager heatmap
Operational risk tiered by team, named and actionable
Scale signal
Expansion ROI
Projected margin impact of full portfolio rollout
The pilot runs on its own terms. When the eight weeks close, the expansion case is already in your hands, built from your own data, in language your board already understands. The evidence speaks before any proposal does.
The patterns that surface during the pilot persist beyond it. A retainer keeps momentum active, preserving the leadership behaviors and team dynamics that shifted so the gains compound rather than erode.
New hires, new pressures, new strategic pivots all introduce new dynamics. Ongoing engagement provides a standing view of how those changes land at the team level so leadership can respond early, when intervention is least costly.
The manager curriculum identifies a growth path with multiple phases. A retainer continues into the next set of skill areas, building directly on the pilot baseline so development compounds from week nine forward.
At the close of every pilot we review the success criteria set at the start together and determine whether the evidence supports continued engagement. The decision is made on documented grounds, anchored to what the data showed.
01
30 minutes. We map your portfolio company, team structure, and the attrition signals you are already seeing.
02
Before week 1, we lock the metrics with you. The week 8 readout is a verdict on criteria you endorsed, reviewed together against the same standard you agreed to at the start.
03
Three sprints. Full evidence across hard metrics, team dynamics, manager intelligence, and IC support signal.
04
Week 8 readout is yours. If results support expansion, we bring a scoped retainer proposal. Either way, you leave with the data, the methodology, and a clear view of what the eight weeks produced.