How a PE-backed contact center platform transformed its engineering organization – and was ready when an acquisition landed
The Situation
SharpenCX is a PE-backed B2B SaaS contact center platform with a capable engineering team navigating the complexity that comes with supporting three legacy products across a large, organically grown infrastructure. Like many companies at this stage, the team had outgrown its processes without replacing them – and the usual consequences were setting in.
Priorities shifted between departments without a clear owner. Sprint processes had gaps: tickets lacked estimates, work fell out of sprints, and visibility into who was working on what was limited. A wide surface area of legacy code and half-finished migrations kept engineers reactive, and there was no technical roadmap to get ahead of it. Senior engineers carried critical institutional knowledge, and the team’s bench was still developing.
The baseline metrics reflected these challenges. In the 90 days before Axiomatic’s engagement:
- 36 story points per sprint — below the team’s potential
- 46 escalations — keeping engineers in reactive mode
- Only 3 strategic items completed — with most capacity consumed by unplanned work
- 100+ Slack DMs per month to a single person for institutional knowledge
These are common patterns in PE-backed SaaS companies managing technical debt and scaling pressures simultaneously. What SharpenCX needed wasn’t a framework or a slide deck – it was someone who would embed with the team and fix the underlying systems.
Phase 1: The Diagnostic (Weeks 1-2)
Axiomatic founder Chris Vannoy embedded with SharpenCX’s product and engineering teams – attending standups, sprint ceremonies, and 1:1s with every team member. He reviewed the codebase, mapped infrastructure dependencies through conversations rather than documentation (because documentation didn’t exist), and observed how work actually moved through the organization.
Two weeks in, he delivered a comprehensive Product Development Analysis identifying four interconnected challenges:
Prioritization needed a single owner. QA, Product, Care, and Engineering each operated from their own sense of what mattered most. Without a clear owner or communication framework, work on lower-priority items consumed engineering time while strategic initiatives stalled.
Process gaps limited visibility and predictability. The team’s Jira workflow had been designed for a larger organization and no longer matched how anyone actually worked. Sprint ceremonies lacked structure, and there was no release management process that kept GTM teams informed.
Legacy complexity drove reactive work. Three long-lived products with a wide surface area of code and infrastructure meant constant context-switching. Half-finished migrations compounded the problem, and a lack of technical roadmap meant there was no way to get ahead of it.
Retention risk and team development. Senior engineers carrying institutional knowledge were approaching burnout, while newer team members needed more structured mentorship and pairing to develop effectively. The team was disconnected from the impact of their work on customers.
Each problem came with specific symptoms observed during the diagnostic and concrete remediation steps — not imported frameworks, but recommendations tailored to SharpenCX’s reality.
Why PE Sponsors Care: Technical debt and delivery challenges show up as compressed margins (engineering costs rising faster than revenue), delayed product launches (missing market windows), and integration risk (acquisitions that can’t be absorbed).
The companies that fix delivery systems early create capacity for strategic work and better acquisition outcomes.
Phase 2: The Transformation (Weeks 3-13)
Over the next eleven weeks, Vannoy worked alongside the team to implement changes across every dimension of the diagnostic findings.
Process and workflow. Streamlined the Jira workflow to match the team’s actual size and needs. Introduced lightweight estimation in sprint ceremonies. Established consistent reporting to identify bottlenecks. Defined and began tracking key performance metrics – cycle time, velocity, escalations, and releases – giving the team and leadership a shared picture of progress for the first time.
Incident and release management. Tightened incident management processes and built a release management workflow that included GTM teams – closing a gap that had left customer-facing staff without visibility into what was shipping and when.
Prioritization and alignment. Established Product as the single owner of prioritization. Introduced regular customer review meetings so market-facing teams could surface needs through a structured process rather than ad-hoc escalations. Created a regular engineering update cadence providing organizational-level visibility into progress.
Infrastructure and operations. Brought structure and management to the CloudOps team. Began documentation and knowledge transfer for infrastructure that had previously lived in a few engineers’ heads – reducing single-point-of-failure risk.
Team development. Introduced more systematic pairing between junior and experienced engineers. Pushed for career development conversations. Created channels for customer feedback to reach the engineering team – reconnecting builders with the impact of their work.
The Results
By the end of Q3 2025, the transformation showed in both the numbers and the team’s daily experience.
SharpenCX shipped more in Q3 than Q1 and Q2 combined – with fewer escalations and incidents. The team moved from reactive mode to consistent, predictable sprints of high-impact work. Strategic items that had been stalled for months started moving.
The qualitative shift mattered just as much. Engineers had clarity on company priorities. Sprint ceremonies were productive. Escalations flowed through defined channels. The team had a process they understood and owned – not one imposed on them.
Phase 3: Filling the Gap (Month 4)
When a product leader departed for another opportunity, SharpenCX asked Vannoy to step into an interim product role. He kept the delivery machine running – triaging bugs, reviewing recently reported issues, managing prioritization – while the company sourced a replacement.
This wasn’t a planned offering. It was a natural extension of the trust built during the transformation: leadership knew Vannoy understood the team, the codebase, and the priorities well enough to maintain momentum in a critical role. He further refined escalation procedures and improved how the team prioritized competing demands, complementing the process improvements already underway.
During this same period, an engineering team lead departed voluntarily to help with a family business – the only engineering departure across the entire five-month engagement, and unrelated to the team’s trajectory.
Phase 4: The Acquisition Diagnostic (Month 5)
In December 2025, SharpenCX acquired Ytel, an outbound dialing SaaS platform. The acquisition brought seven new engineers, a Java-based technology stack, operations split between Google Cloud and two physical data centers, and a decade of organizational habits that bore no resemblance to SharpenCX’s way of working.
SharpenCX’s PE sponsor and leadership needed to understand what they’d acquired – not just the code, but whether the team could execute, who the real leaders were, and what was going to break.
Vannoy conducted a 30-day diagnostic. He interviewed every member of the Ytel application team across US and India locations. He attended their ceremonies, observed daily working patterns, reviewed their technical infrastructure, and sat in the meetings where the real dynamics surfaced.
What He Found
A capable team in transition. The Ytel engineers were senior and technically strong. To maximize the value of the acquisition, the focus was on integrating this talent into SharpenCX’s model of distributed ownership. Moving to an autonomous, engineer-driven model would require deliberate transition support – not because the team lacked ability, but because aligning two different working cultures takes intentional effort.
Inherited collaboration patterns that needed rethinking. The team maintained an always-on Google Meet as their primary collaboration channel – a practice that began during the pandemic and had persisted for years. While some team members valued the ambient connection, others found it distracting, and it forced India-based engineers into overnight shifts. The pattern had outlived its usefulness and was already being evaluated by leadership.
Critical knowledge concentration. A single engineer held comprehensive knowledge of the entire Ytel infrastructure – approximately 40 Java services across cloud and data center environments. This created both a bottleneck and a single-point-of-failure risk that needed to be addressed through documentation and knowledge transfer.
A product capacity gap. SharpenCX was already lean on product management before the acquisition. Adding Ytel’s engineering capacity without scaling product created a vacuum where engineers lacked direction, worked on speculative projects, or were pulled into work through informal channels.
Infrastructure consolidation opportunities. Ytel maintained bespoke infrastructure – including physical hardware in two data centers – for functionality that commodity SaaS providers now handle at lower cost. Combined with functional overlap between the two platforms, there was a significant opportunity to reduce complexity and operating costs through deliberate consolidation.
The Deliverable
Vannoy delivered a comprehensive narrative report covering team leadership and organization, operational patterns, capacity and prioritization, and infrastructure and technology – with specific recommendations and a phased implementation roadmap spanning immediate actions through long-term strategic consolidation.
The report identified leadership candidates, assessed retention risks, and provided candid analysis of what needed attention now versus what could wait – the kind of operational intelligence that’s difficult to get from the outside.
SharpenCX’s leadership began acting on recommendations before the presentation was finished. By the time Vannoy walked through the findings with the Head of Engineering and the CEO, the top recommendation – formalizing a new application team lead – was already done.
The Outcome
Over five months, Axiomatic’s engagement with SharpenCX evolved from a delivery transformation to an interim product leadership role to a post-acquisition diagnostic – each phase building on the trust and organizational knowledge established in the last.
For SharpenCX: A team that moved from reactive mode to consistent delivery. Process, metrics, and visibility where gaps had existed. An acquisition integration roadmap built on direct evidence rather than assumptions. And only one departure during the entire engagement – voluntary and unrelated to the work.
For SharpenCX’s PE sponsor: Enough confidence in the engagement’s value that the COO and primary sponsor offered to introduce Axiomatic directly to the PE firm’s deal team – recognizing that portfolio companies facing similar delivery challenges or post-acquisition integration could benefit from the same approach.
We’ve always had a talented team, but legacy processes and high-friction delivery held them back. Chris was the partner we needed to turn things around. We’ve replaced reactive firefighting with a scalable, predictable engine that gives our developers autonomy to ship and our executive team confidence in our ability to execute. – Matt Smith, VP Engineering, SharpenCX
About Axiomatic
Axiomatic helps PE-backed B2B SaaS companies ship software fast, safe, and aligned. Founded by Chris Vannoy — a former engineering leader with a journalism background — Axiomatic embeds with teams rather than observing from a distance. The approach combines investigative rigor with hands-on implementation: diagnosing what’s actually broken, building processes that fit the team (not a framework imported from BigCo), and ensuring changes stick after the engagement ends.
Services include 90-day delivery transformations, pre- and post-acquisition diagnostics, fractional CTO engagements, and engineering leadership coaching.
Vannoy is also the author of Editorial, a framework for the AI age that aligns engineering speed with go-to-market excellence. Learn more about Editorial →
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