War Room.
When the system is on fire and you need senior engineers in the room by Monday.
Forward-deployed engineering for the moments that decide the year.
Request a War Room →When you need this.
War Room exists for five specific situations. If one of these is happening right now, we should talk today.
Production crisis.
The platform is breaking, customers are leaving, and your team can't fix it fast enough.
Security incident.
You've been breached, or you think you have, and you need senior engineers triaging the response while your internal team handles everything else.
M&A technical due diligence.
A deal is closing in 60 days and you need a defensible technical assessment — your codebase, theirs, or both — without distracting your team.
Regulatory or compliance deadline.
SOC 2, HIPAA, PCI, or similar — with a hard deadline and no internal team to drive it.
High-stakes launch behind schedule.
Board has been told the date. The date isn't moving. The work is. We get you there.
How War Room works.
1. Triage Intensive.
Five days, $20,000, fixed price. We embed on-site with your team for the full week — this phase is in-person only, no exceptions. We scope the problem, identify the path forward, and deliver a written engagement charter with success criteria, milestones, and exit conditions. If you don't continue past the intensive, you keep the charter and we shake hands.
2. The engagement.
Senior engineers embedded with your team — in person at your office at least two days a week, in your Slack and standups every day. Decision authority delegated, not requested. We move at the speed the moment requires.
3. The handoff.
Every War Room engagement ends with the client stronger than we found them. Documented systems, hired-in-house replacement when relevant, clean transition. Or we roll into an ongoing engagement at Cause of a Kind's standard rates. Your call.
Pricing.
$20,000 for the Triage Intensive — five days on-site at your office.
$40,000–$80,000 per month for the engagement, depending on team size and intensity. 30-day minimum. Paid up front.
Every engagement requires a minimum of two days per week on-site in your office. The in-person component is what makes this work.
We accept no more than three concurrent War Rooms.
Who shows up.
War Room is staffed by senior engineers only. No juniors, no contractors we haven't worked with for years, no "we'll find someone." Mike Rispoli (15+ years, CTO of Cause of a Kind) leads every engagement personally for the first 30 days.
We've shipped at scale for some of the world's largest brands, and for mission-critical systems where a single bug or breach puts real livelihoods at risk. We know what stakes feel like.
Request a War Room →What War Room is not.
- Not a staff augmentation contract. We work as a unit, not as bodies.
- Not a discovery exercise. By day five we have a charter and a path.
- Not remote-only. The in-person component is structural, not negotiable. If you can't host us at least twice a week, War Room isn't the right offer.
- Not for greenfield projects. If you're starting from zero with no urgency, talk to Cause of a Kind about a regular engagement.
Request a War Room.
Tell us what's on fire.
We respond within four hours during business days.