Due Diligence Report: M&A Pre-Close Technical Risk Summary
A consolidated technical risk summary built to be read by a deal committee, not just an engineering team.
Executive Summary
This summary consolidated findings from database, observability cost, key-person dependency, and disaster recovery assessments into a single technical risk view for the acquisition committee ahead of close.
Findings
No single finding across the underlying assessments was independently deal-breaking, but the combination of database scalability risk, key-person dependency, and single-provider resilience risk compounded into a materially elevated post-close integration risk.
Recommendation: Price a defined technical remediation budget into the deal terms rather than treating these as post-close surprises.
Several findings had dependencies on each other; addressing database topology risk before key-person documentation risk would have been more expensive than the reverse order.
Recommendation: Sequence remediation explicitly in the first 100 days post-close, in dependency order, not severity order alone.
The combination of undocumented tribal knowledge and a planned post-close engineering leadership transition created compounding continuity risk beyond either factor alone.
Recommendation: Delay the planned leadership transition until the highest-priority documentation gaps are closed, or retain transitional advisory coverage through that window.
Conclusion
Individually moderate risks compounded into an elevated aggregate risk primarily through sequencing and timing, not technical severity alone. A deal committee reading only the individual reports would have under-priced the combined exposure.
Frequently Asked
Why summarize multiple technical findings into one report for a deal committee?
Individual findings can look moderate in isolation but compound into materially higher aggregate risk once sequencing, timing, and dependency between them are accounted for.