Home-health services operator, stalled for 8 months. Back on the roadmap in 4 weeks.

Situation

A multi-state home-health operator running scheduling and caregiver dispatch. Product was live with paying users but the roadmap had gone quiet. Their previous development partner had stopped responding. The internal team had no senior engineer left on payroll.

What was stuck

Months of dormant feature branches had piled up in the repo. CI was broken in ways the team couldn't diagnose. Two insurance-payer integrations were undocumented and one had started throwing intermittent auth errors nobody could trace. Feature requests from clinic managers had stopped being logged because no one expected them to ship.

What we changed

We started with a paid Stabilization Review. Two weeks, fixed fee, written 30/60/90 deliverable. The review flagged the payer integration as the highest immediate risk and the broken CI as the biggest velocity blocker. We took over the repo, documented the integrations, stabilized CI inside the first week, and shipped the three highest-priority backlog features in the next three. The team transitioned onto a managed retainer for ongoing feature work.

Result

Monthly feature velocity recovered within 30 days of engagement start. The client renewed the retainer for additional quarters before transitioning the work to a new in-house hire. We handed off the repo, the runbooks, and the CI config cleanly. No hostage backlog, no transition fee.

Stack

• Node.js
• PostgreSQL
• React
• AWS (ECS + RDS)
• Stripe
• Payer API integrations