Series B and beyond checklist

Is there a platform engineering or internal developer platform strategy to reduce cognitive load for product teams?

Platform engineering ROI becomes measurable at 40 to 50 engineers. Without it, every team reinvents infrastructure primitives.

Are there clear domain ownership boundaries that prevent knowledge silos from forming?

As teams grow past 30 engineers, knowledge silos slow delivery and increase incident risk.

Is API versioning mature, with backward compatibility guarantees and a formal deprecation lifecycle?

Enterprise customers build integrations on your API. Breaking changes destroy trust in ways that are hard to recover from.

Is there a formal engineering RFC or design document process for significant architectural decisions?

Undocumented architectural decisions become institutional folklore. They slow new team members and obscure the reasoning behind constraints.

Are automated quality gates enforced in CI - coverage thresholds, complexity limits, dependency audits?

Manual enforcement of quality standards breaks down at scale. Automation is required for consistency.

Is there a clear and documented build-vs-buy policy for platform components?

Undisciplined build decisions at Series B+ create hidden long-term maintenance costs that compound with team size.

Is the company SOC 2 Type II compliant, or on a defined path to certification?

Enterprise procurement increasingly requires SOC 2 Type II as a condition of purchase, not a nice-to-have.

Is there a formal vendor risk management and third-party security assessment program?

Supply chain attacks increasingly target third-party integrations. Vendors require formal assessment at enterprise scale.

Is there a bug bounty program or a documented responsible disclosure policy?

Enterprise customers and security researchers expect a formal disclosure pathway. Its absence is a red flag in security questionnaires.

Is network segmentation and zero-trust access implemented for production environments?

Perimeter-based security models are inadequate for distributed, cloud-native architectures at Series B+ scale.

Are Data Processing Agreements and data residency requirements supported for enterprise customers?

EU enterprise customers require DPAs. US enterprise customers increasingly require data residency options. Both are sales blockers without infrastructure support.

Is there a tested business continuity and disaster recovery plan with documented RTO and RPO targets?

Enterprise contracts and compliance audits demand demonstrable recovery capabilities, not just documented policies.

Is there a dedicated security function or a security-aware engineering lead with sufficient authority?

Security cannot be a part-time responsibility at Series B+ scale.

Can the platform support multi-tenant enterprise deployments with strict data isolation?

Multi-tenancy at enterprise scale requires architectural intentionality. Retrofitting it post-Series B is extremely expensive.

Is there a global edge and regional deployment strategy for latency-sensitive enterprise markets?

Enterprise customers in multiple geographies have latency expectations that require geographic distribution.

Is the database architecture using read replicas, connection pooling, and partitioning for sustained high-load?

A single database instance is almost always a bottleneck at Series B+ data volumes.

Is there a capacity planning process aligned with business growth forecasts?

Reactive capacity planning causes avoidable incidents and emergency cloud spend. Enterprise SLAs require proactive planning.

Are there published SLAs for enterprise customers, and is the infrastructure architected to meet them?

SLAs are commercial commitments. Infrastructure must be designed to meet them, not hoped to.

Are chaos engineering or resilience testing practices in place?

At Series B+, resilience testing should be systematic and scheduled, not accidental.

Is there an active FinOps practice managing cloud costs against gross margin targets?

Cloud costs at Series B+ scale can represent 15 to 40% of gross margin without active optimisation.

Is there a defined database read/write separation strategy with read replicas for reporting and analytics workloads?

Mixing analytical and transactional workloads on the same database is a common cause of production degradation at scale.

Is there a formal change management process for high-risk production changes?

Uncontrolled production changes are a SOC 2 audit finding and an enterprise sales blocker.

Are there runbooks for all critical operational procedures?

Runbooks are the difference between a 30-minute incident and a 6-hour incident. Without them, knowledge lives in people, not systems.

Is the observability stack unified across all services, with a single pane of glass?

Fragmented observability tools create blind spots in complex distributed systems.

Are there end-to-end synthetic monitoring checks for all critical customer journeys?

Infrastructure health monitoring tells you the server is running. Synthetic monitoring tells you what the customer experiences.

What are the current DORA metrics: deployment frequency, change failure rate, MTTR, and lead time for changes?

Elite performing teams at this scale deploy multiple times per day with a change failure rate below 5%.

Is there an error budget policy that governs the tradeoff between reliability and feature velocity?

Without error budgets, reliability conversations become political rather than data-driven.

Are there automated rollback mechanisms that trigger without human intervention for critical deployment failures?

Manual rollback during a production incident is slow, error-prone, and stressful. Automation removes human judgment from the critical path.

Is there a certified disaster recovery capability with RTO and RPO targets that have been tested in the last 12 months?

Enterprise contracts and compliance requirements demand tested recovery capabilities. Documented but untested plans do not count.

Is there a formal post-mortem process with action item tracking and trend analysis across incidents?

Post-mortems without systematic follow-through and trend analysis provide no cumulative safety improvement.