Architecture Audit
Six to eight weeks. The call on the system you've been arguing about for a year, a remediation plan ranked by lift against revenue impact, and the work imported into your tracker — ready for your team on day one.
Overview
A load-bearing system is costing money, velocity, or both — and the call to do something about it is stuck in committee. The rebuild the team has been drafting in their heads for a year. The platform bet that keeps getting pushed to next board meeting. The infra line on the P&L big enough to be its own conversation. From inside the company there isn't an angle on it; everyone has a stake in the answer.
The Architecture Audit is the engagement that makes the call from the outside and documents the path to act on it. Six to eight weeks from access: a written decision on the system, a remediation plan ranked by lift against revenue impact, and the work imported into your tracker. The deliverable is the plan. The outcome is the quarter your team stops arguing and starts building, because someone made the call and left the receipts.
What this engagement produces
Four outcomes, each measurable, each delivered in writing before the engagement closes.
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A written call on the system.
Keep it, rebuild it, or replace it — with the reasoning, the numbers behind each path, and the second-order effects named.
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A prioritized remediation plan.
Every recommendation ranked by estimated lift against revenue impact, sequenced so the cheapest, highest-return changes ship first.
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Architecture documented where it matters.
Current-state diagram, target-state diagram, and the decisions behind the delta — in a format your team can hand to a new hire.
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Importable tickets in your tracker.
Jira, Linear, GitHub — the work translated into work items with acceptance criteria, ready to pick up on day one.
Scope of work
Three workstreams. Each one ends with a named deliverable your team can act on without me in the room.
- Workstream 1
System read
Read the code, the diagrams, the contracts, and the incidents — enough to see the shape.
- Current-state architecture mapping — services, data flows, third-party dependencies, failure modes
- Code review of the load-bearing paths — [TK: name the actual systems that are in play, e.g., "the identity layer, the billing pipeline, the event ingestion bus"]
- Vendor and integration inventory — contracts, costs, lock-in, renewal windows
- Incident and postmortem review — the last 90 days of what broke and why
- Stakeholder interviews — engineering leadership, the people on-call, product owners
- Performance and cost baseline — what the system costs today, by line item, against what it's producing
- Workstream 2
Root-cause analysis
Separate the symptoms from the cause. Separate the cause from the constraints that made it the cause.
- Root-cause identification for the top three to five structural issues
- Constraints audit — the decisions that were right when they were made and are wrong now
- Dependency graph — what can change without breaking what
- [TK: named artifact specific to your stack, e.g., "Prebid configuration audit" or "data contract review"]
- Cost-of-inaction estimate — what another four quarters of status quo costs, in dollars and in engineering time
- Workstream 3
Remediation plan
The sequenced call. Every change ranked by effort against impact, ordered so early wins ship while the larger work gets staged.
- Prioritized remediation plan — ranked list, lift vs. revenue/reliability impact
- Sequenced roadmap — milestones, dependencies, decision points
- Architecture specification for the target state — diagrams, component responsibilities, interface contracts
- Vendor scorecard — keep, replace, or renegotiate, with reasoning
- Risk register — the known risks, the estimated risks, and the ones worth flagging to the board
- Importable work items in your tracker — tickets with acceptance criteria, in the format your team already uses
Out of scope
These are named to be honest about where my expertise ends. If you need support in these areas, I can recommend specialists who do this work well.
- Hands-on implementation of the remediation plan. That's a separate retainer, scoped at the close of this engagement if the fit is there.
- Staff augmentation or hiring. I can tell you what the roles should look like; I don't fill them.
- Legal, privacy, or compliance sign-off on architectural changes. I'll flag the areas that need counsel; your team owns the review.
- [TK: domain-specific exclusion — e.g., "DSP commercial negotiations," "data-residency architecture for EU expansion," "SOC 2 audit preparation"]
- Ongoing managed services or operations. Once the plan lands, execution is yours or a retainer, not an open-ended arrangement.
Access and inputs
The engagement clock starts when access to core systems and stakeholders is granted. The more context you can hand me up front, the sharper the output.
- Read access to the repositories under review and the supporting infra (staging is fine where production is sensitive)
- Architecture diagrams, runbooks, and any existing strategy docs — even the half-finished ones
- Calendar access to three to five stakeholders: engineering leadership, on-call, product, and [TK: the person who owns the system in question]
- Access to vendor contracts and the current cost breakdown for the systems in scope
- The last ninety days of incidents, postmortems, and any board-facing material that names the problem
- A named point of contact on your side — one person who can unblock access when something stalls
Context is the input. The more you send up front, the less of week one I spend asking for it.
How the engagement runs
Five steps. Same sequence every time — the variable is the system, not the process.
- 1
Kickoff call.
Week one, day one. Align on access, make introductions, confirm the stakeholder map, and set the priorities that will frame discovery.
- 2
Discovery.
Weeks one through four. Structured conversations with the team, code and system review, vendor and cost audit. Every call is a discovery call — nothing scheduled that isn't advancing the read.
- 3
Weekly async status.
Every Friday, in writing. What I looked at, what I decided, what I'm still sitting with, and what I need from you next week. No meeting tax.
- 4
Early wins flagged on discovery.
If something actionable surfaces mid-engagement — a vendor renewal about to misfire, a misconfiguration bleeding money, a quick fix worth shipping now — it gets flagged the day I find it, not held for the final deliverable.
- 5
Presentation of findings.
Week six to eight. Formal walkthrough with the room that needs to hear it — usually the CTO and the CEO, sometimes the board. The deliverables land in writing the same week.
What lands at the end
Every deliverable is a noun you can point to. Each one lives in a document, a diagram, or a tracker — not in a slide.
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Strategic remediation plan.
The ranked, sequenced list of changes, prioritized by lift against revenue and reliability impact.
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Written call on the system.
The decision in one document — keep, rebuild, or replace, with the reasoning and the numbers behind each path.
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Root cause analysis.
The top three to five structural issues, named, with the causes and the constraints that produced them.
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Current-state architecture document.
Diagrams, component responsibilities, data flows, failure modes.
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Target-state architecture specification.
Where the system should land, with component-level responsibilities and interface contracts.
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Vendor scorecard.
Every third-party in scope, scored: keep, replace, or renegotiate, with reasoning and renewal-window timing.
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Cost-of-inaction estimate.
What another four quarters of status quo costs, in dollars and in engineering time.
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Risk register.
Known risks, estimated risks, and the ones worth surfacing to the board.
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Sequenced roadmap.
Milestones, dependencies, decision points, and the team composition each phase assumes.
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Stakeholder interview synthesis.
What the team told me, grouped by theme, with the tensions named.
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Executive summary.
One document, written for the CEO and the board — what was decided, what it costs to not act, what comes next.
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Importable work items in your tracker.
Jira, Linear, GitHub Issues, or the format of your choosing — the roadmap translated directly into execution.
Investment
Fixed fee. Not hourly, not day-rate, not a meter running while I'm in your Slack. The scope is fixed, the fee is fixed, and the timeline is six to eight weeks from the day access is granted. If the problem turns out to need a different shape, I'll tell you before we start — not after.
Terms are fifty percent on execution of the engagement letter, fifty percent on delivery, Net 15. The investment is designed to pay for itself — usually through the vendor line that gets renegotiated, the rebuild that doesn't have to happen twice, or the quarter you don't spend arguing about what to build.
Scope drives fee. Send the problem and we'll come back with a scoped proposal inside a week.
What comes after
At the close of the engagement, there are two paths. Neither is pre-sold, and neither is required — your team can take the plan and run it cleanly without me. Both paths exist because some clients want them, and they're named so you can plan for them.
Execution support retainer.
If your team wants continuity during rollout — implementation oversight, vendor negotiations, architectural review on the critical work — we'll scope a retainer at the close of Phase 1. Monthly, cancelable, defined scope.
Phase 2.
If the plan uncovers a second engagement shape — a Strategy & Architecture Design, a scoped rebuild — we'll scope it at the end of Phase 1 rather than pre-selling it. The decision is yours, and it's a new engagement letter, not a rollover.
The default is a clean hand-off. The retainer exists because some teams want the continuity. Either is fine.
About Cauley & Co.
I'm Jordan Cauley. Eight years leading revenue products at a publisher platform serving more than sixteen thousand properties, a Prebid Board seat, and named vendor work across the programmatic supply chain. Cauley & Co. is my consulting practice under Cauley Digital LLC — the decisions you don't have the internal angle to make, made and documented from the outside.
[TK: engagement-specific proof — for architecture audits, something like: "I've led architecture reviews that rebuilt the header bidding stack at a publisher platform at scale, untangled identity dependencies across a dozen upstream vendors, and killed the renegotiation-by-default cycle that bleeds margin. Jordan's own language needed — this is a placeholder to be filled in with named work."]
You can read the operator work on LinkedIn and the current writing at /writing.
Common questions
- How is this different from a Big Four capabilities study?
- A Big Four study ends with a deck and a set of recommendations. This engagement ends with the call in writing, the plan sequenced, and the work imported into your tracker. Different deliverable, different register.
- What if we already have internal architecture docs?
- Send them. The more context on day one, the less of week one spent building it from scratch. Existing docs make the audit sharper, not redundant.
- Can you execute the plan after the audit?
- Sometimes, on a retainer, scoped at the close of Phase 1. The default is a clean hand-off to your team. The retainer exists when the continuity makes sense.
- How many clients are you running at once?
- A limited number each quarter. This kind of engagement doesn't scale past one person's calendar, and pretending otherwise is how the deliverable gets softer.
- What does it cost?
- Scope drives fee. Send the problem and a scoped proposal comes back inside a week. No rate card, no "starting at."
Tell us what you need
If this is the quarter you fix it, this engagement is built for it. Six to eight weeks from access: the call in writing, the path documented, the work in your tracker. Limited engagements this quarter. If the timing fits, send the problem — a reply comes back inside two business days.
[email protected] · 336-314-3314