Product team checklist for aligning product management and engineering

Seed, Feed, Weed

The United States Special Operations Command (SOCOM) has 5 truths that they live by. All of them have guided SOCOM to be the premier fighting force in the world and they…

AKF

December 6, 2018 · 5 min read

Architecture Technical Diligence SaaS Leadership Organization Process Product Big Data Security

The AKF Difference

During the last 12 years, many prospective clients have asked us some variation of the following questions: “What makes you different?”, “Why should we consider hiring you?”,…

Marty Abbott

December 4, 2018 · 4 min read

Architecture Organization Process Product

The Importance of QA

“Quality in a service or product is not what you put into it. It’s what the customer gets out of it.” Peter Drucker The Importance of QA High levels of quality…

AKF

November 20, 2018 · 8 min read

Leadership Process

Diagnosing and Fixing Software Development Performance

Diagnosing the cause of poor performance from your engineering team is difficult and can be costly for the organization if done incorrectly. Most everyone will agree that…

Roger Andelin

November 20, 2018 · 7 min read

Security

The Elusive Data Breach

“but in this world nothing can be said to be certain, except death and taxes.” -Benjamin Franklin ...and data breaches. Given the era that Benjamin Franklin lived in…

AKF

November 15, 2018 · 6 min read

Putting Customer Interaction First in Software Development

Eat Your Own Dog Food Eating your own dog food is a common phrase that is cynical from the start – unless you like eating dog food! A more positive, but often overused cliche,…

Pete Ferguson

November 1, 2018 · 7 min read

Process

A Financial Analogy for Technical Debt

Understanding Technical Debt During the course of our client engagements, there are a few common topics or themes that are always discussed, and the clients themselves usually…

Bill Armelin

October 12, 2018 · 8 min read

Cloud Security Misconceptions

Cloud hosting is growing rapidly, with many companies leveraging the cloud to deliver all or a portion of their products and services. This trend is unlikely to change any…

Greg Fennewald

September 19, 2018 · 3 min read

Organization Process

The Domino or Multiplicative Effect of Failure

As part of our Technical Due Diligence and Architectural reviews, we always want to see a company’s system architecture, understand their process, and review their org chart. …

Pete Ferguson

September 18, 2018 · 6 min read

Organization Process

Effective Incident Communications

Everything fails! This is a mantra that we are always espousing at AKF. At some point, these failures will manifest themselves as an outage. In a SaaS world, restoring service…

Bill Armelin

September 17, 2018 · 4 min read

Technical Diligence Leadership Process Product Security

Are you compromised?

It’s important to acknowledge that a core competency for hackers is hiding their tracks and maintaining dormancy for long periods of time after they’ve infiltrated an environment.…

AKF

September 14, 2018 · 2 min read

Architecture Technical Diligence Process

Scalability

The Scalability Cube – Your Guide to Evaluating Scalability Perhaps the most common question we get at AKF Partners when performing technical due diligence on a company is, “Will…

AKF

September 10, 2018 · 6 min read

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