About ● A note from the founders
01 · Why this exists
We started Levelset because we kept reading the same post-mortem. A program that mattered to the business missed go-live, or went live and underdelivered, or shipped on time and then quietly stalled at adoption. The team would convene a retrospective, write it up, and circulate the document. The conclusions almost always read the same. The technology choice had been reasonable. The business case had held. The SI had done broadly competent work. The failure had been organizational. Sponsorship that drifted. A change-management workstream that nobody elevated. A workforce that was trained the month before cutover. A steering committee that re-litigated the same design decisions every month until the people doing the work stopped caring about the outcome.
Those reports were honest. They were also too late. They documented the failure mode of a program that had already failed, on behalf of an executive team that no longer had the authority or appetite to fix it. The work we wanted to be doing was the same diagnostic, conducted two years earlier, while the program could still be corrected.
Most of our careers had been spent inside the consultancies that get hired after that failure becomes undeniable. There is a worthwhile version of that work, and we are not it. We wanted to build the diagnostic that would have prevented half the engagements we had been hired into. The one that an executive could run on themselves, before the trouble began.
Levelset is that diagnostic. The rubric is published in full. The interview is twenty-five minutes. The report arrives by Friday. The point is to give a program leader an honest read on where they stand, fast enough that the read is still useful.
03 · What we believe
A company's beliefs are the part of it that doesn't change when the product does. These are ours. Disagreeing with any one of them is a reasonable reason to choose someone else.
Belief 01
The technology is usually fine. The business case usually holds. The failure is organizational, and organizational failure has a small number of recognizable patterns. The rubric exists because the patterns are recognizable.
Belief 02
A useful read in 25 minutes is worth more than a thorough one in 12 weeks. Programs harden fast. A diagnostic that takes a quarter to deliver becomes an autopsy.
Belief 03
Anyone can challenge a Levelset score by reading the rubric line that produced it. We do not believe in proprietary methodologies on this kind of work. The leverage is in the calibration, not in the secrecy.
Belief 04
We will not sell you the change-management practice that the diagnostic recommends. If the report says you need a fractional transformation lead, we will name three firms that do that well. We will not take a referral fee from any of them.
Belief 05 · The one we feel hardest about
A report that reads like a slide-deck export costs us nothing to produce and costs our client almost nothing to ignore. A report written in prose, structured like an argument, and reviewed by a human before delivery is the part of the work that actually shows up in the steering meeting. The diagnostic isn't done when the rubric scores; it is done when the document is good enough to act on.
04 · How we work
We have built the business so that our incentive on any given report is to write the truest one we can. The rules below are the structural choices that make that possible.
No paid relationships with SIs, software vendors, or technology providers. If the rubric points away from your incumbent vendor, the report will say so.
None taken, ever. We will recommend firms by name when the diagnostic calls for it. None of those firms pay us.
Transcripts and reports are not used to train models. They are not shared outside Levelset. We sign a mutual NDA on request before the interview.
We publish anonymized failure patterns and rubric updates. We never publish anything that identifies a client, including their industry segment, when the segment is small enough to be identifying.
Fixed per-diagnostic pricing. No upsells. No retainer pressure. Enterprise clients contact us directly.
We will not run the diagnostic on a program below $5M, on a hypercare-phase program, or as a litigation artifact. The rubric is not calibrated for any of those cases and the report would mis-grade.
06 · Get in touch
If you have a question we haven't answered, a partnership idea, or a program we shouldn't take on, email a human directly.
If you've read this far
25 min · PDF by Friday