For venture studios and portfolio teams
Your client is another company you part-own, and they never fill in the survey
Tools built for a portfolio company or an internal department have all the obligations of a product and none of the feedback loop. Nobody churns — they just stop using it and go back to the spreadsheet.
The situation
When the customer is a sister company or three floors away, the usual signals disappear. There's no renewal date to force the conversation and no invoice to argue over, so a tool can be quietly abandoned for a year before anyone notices the team reverted to their old process. The budget conversation, when it comes, is about headcount rather than the tool — and by then there's nothing to point at.
What you'd count
The only part that changes between clients. Everything else — rules, score, feedback, incidents, report — is identical.
task.completed— the work the tool was built to absorbteam.active— how much of the team is genuinely on itmanual.override— how often they route around it — the honest warning sign
What you'd ask
Two audiences, asked separately and reported separately.
- The company or department head
“Has this actually taken work off your team?”
- The people using it
“What still makes you go back to the old way?”
What you end up with
Evidence that the tool earns its maintenance, in a form a budget owner accepts — and an early warning when adoption slips, while it's still a fixable usability problem rather than a team that quietly left.