M&A without the IT hangover: surviving post-merger integration
Acquiring a company is hard. Integrating their fragmented, undocumented tech stack into yours is harder.
The Morning After the Deal Closes
The term sheet is signed, the press release is out, and the champagne is gone. Now comes the reality: you just acquired a completely different technology stack, a different engineering culture, and a whole new set of undocumented technical debt.
The 90-Day Integration Window
Post-merger technical integration usually fails because companies try to do too much, too slowly. The goal in the first 90 days isn't to perfectly rewrite their platform to match yours. The goal is operational continuity and security standardization.
- Day 1-30: Identity & Access. Getting everyone on the same email, Slack/Teams, and SSO. If you don't control access, you don't control the new asset.
- Day 30-60: Security Baseline. Rolling out standard endpoint protection and auditing their cloud infrastructure for immediate vulnerabilities.
- Day 60-90: The Roadmap. Deciding what stays, what goes, and what gets rebuilt.
The Need for Independent Oversight
Internal teams are usually too biased to lead integration effectively because they just want the acquired team to "do it our way." DoubleChecked steps in as a neutral executive vCIO to audit the acquired assets objectively, rationalize costs, and build a sane integration roadmap that doesn't burn out your existing engineers.