Release Bottleneck Review
Two weeks to a measured decision about your releases.
In two weeks, we help you determine whether your releases are slowed by the pipeline, the process or the platform. You leave with a decision, the cost behind it, and a fixed-price plan to act on it.
Who it's for
Engineering leaders with 40 to 500 engineers whose releases still need manual steps, handoffs between teams, or the one person who knows how.
The decision it settles
You pick one at the kickoff:
Why the last one matters now: in a 2025 study of more than 10,000 developers, Faros AI found that teams with high AI adoption merged 98% more pull requests, while review time rose 91% and company-level delivery did not improve.
How it works
- Kickoff, 60 minutes, at your office in Benelux or by video. We name the decision, up to three release flows, and the hourly cost the numbers will use. A release flow is one pipeline and deploy path; services that share it count as one flow.
- Measure. We pull run history, deploy logs and ticket timestamps from your tools, and walk each release flow with the people who run it, including whoever approves releases. Every step gets two numbers: hands-on time and waiting time.
- Diagnose. Each bottleneck is classed as pipeline, process or platform, and gets hours a year, cost a year and a fix.
- Decision meeting, 90 minutes, with you and the people who decide: the options, what each costs and returns, and our recommendation.
What you get
What it takes from your team
Price
From
€3,500
ex VAT, one release flow
EUR 3,500 excl. VAT, fixed, for one release flow, plus EUR 1,500 for each extra flow. North America: USD 4,000, plus USD 1,750 per extra flow. Half at signing, half on acceptance.
Guarantee
The second half is due when the Review meets its written acceptance criteria.
Review fees paid come off the price of a Build signed within 60 days of the decision meeting, because the Review replaces the Build's first week.
Why this works
Our method has four steps:
- Simplify how code moves from idea to production
- Standardize processes, keep them consistent across all teams
- Automate the release workflow
- Educate peers to follow the same steps
The Review adds a measured cost to every step of your release, taken from your own systems, so the decision rests on numbers your finance team can check.
We built release automation inside Nike and ASML. At Nike, it cut store server upgrades from 6-8 hours to about 3, eight at a time instead of two, and gave back 600+ engineering hours a year. At ASML, self-service CI saves 300+ engineering hours a year.
You work with us directly, from the first call to the decision meeting.
Questions
The Review starts from them and adds where the time goes and what each fix is worth.
Then they are in scope. Approvals are often where the waiting is, and the Review measures them like any other step.
No. The blueprint is yours.
The Review measures time and steps, so it works with any CI/CD tool. Our builds so far ran on Jenkins, AWS and Azure, in Python, Groovy, Ansible, Bash and PowerShell.
Read-only access or exports, under NDA. Exports are deleted after the decision meeting.
Talk to the engineer
"As an engineer, I know the challenges in software delivery from both business and technical views."
