The Chief of Staff for
Engineering Leadership
They tell you how fast your team works. We tell you whether your team is working on the right things.
SHIP starts from your company goals, reads the work your teams already produce — code, tickets, docs, chat — then briefs you, answers any question, and preps your 1:1s. Without chasing anyone.
Already onboarded? Log in
Meet your Chief of Staff
Everything a great chief of staff does — briefs you, answers questions, preps your 1:1s, catches drift — grounded in the work your team already produces.
Brief
A decision-ready morning narrative: what moved which initiative, where drift showed up, and what needs a call — grounded in artefacts, not another wall of DORA charts.
Ask
Conversational answers over your whole engineering org. “Is payments on track? Who’s blocked? What changed since Friday?” In the app, in Slack, or inside Claude and Cursor.
Prep
1:1s that write themselves. SHIP assembles each report’s recent work, open threads, and last meeting’s notes so you walk in prepared — every time.
Catch drift
Early signal when execution diverges from the initiatives you funded — while you can still steer, not in the quarterly review when the miss is already baked.
Not another dashboard to check. An intelligence layer that starts from your goals — then holds the work underneath accountable to them.
Fast execution is easy to measure.
Correct
execution is not.
Most tooling optimises activity. SHIP starts from what leadership said matters — then classifies real work against that intent.
The Bottom-Up Trap
Velocity, cycle time, and DORA-style dashboards tell you how fast the machine spins — not whether it is pointed at the right hill. Busy teams can still ship the wrong roadmap.
The Narrative Gap
Standups sell a story: “almost done,” “good progress.” The artefact trail — PRs, tickets, docs — often tells a different one. Reconciling the two burns leadership hours every week.
The Tool Sprawl Tax
Jira, GitHub, Confluence, Slack, Linear, Notion — truth is fragmented. Without a top-down map from company goals to actual work, execs chase updates instead of making decisions.
SHIP is top-down engineering
intelligence — goals first, tasks
second
You define initiatives and context. SHIP reads the artefact trail your teams already produce — code, tickets, docs, chat — and classifies it against that intent. The output is alignment and drift signal: what actually moved the goals, not a leaderboard of who merged the most PRs.
Bottom-up tools answer: “How much did we ship?” That rewards motion. SHIP answers: “Did we ship what leadership committed to?”
Same connectors and data — different direction of reasoning. From company goals to the concrete task, not from activity metrics to a story.
The SHIP Method
Encode initiatives & success criteria
Classify artefacts against that intent
Surface drift early; adjust priorities
Decision-ready briefs, not raw metrics
From leadership intent to ground truth
Encode
Goals firstCapture initiatives, success criteria, and technical context — the same judgement you would put in a board pack, in a form SHIP can classify against.
Connect
Artefact trailOAuth into GitHub, Jira, Confluence, Slack, Linear, Notion (and more on the roadmap). Read-only access to the work that already happened.
Brief
Top-down truthA morning narrative: what moved which initiative, where drift shows up, what deserves a decision — not a vanity chart of how busy everyone looked.
You own priorities and trade-offs. SHIP does not replace that — it makes the gap between intent and execution visible early. Do the right work, not only more work.
Your stack. Your artefact trail.
SHIP connects to the systems teams already use — read-only OAuth, no rip-and-replace, no forcing everyone into a new UI for day-to-day work.
Available today
Coming soon
Meeting recordings & transcripts
Docs, Sheets & Slides
Meeting recordings & transcripts
What we classify
Coming soon: meeting and shared-doc connectors to capture context that never became a ticket — opt-in, read-only. Vertical specifics (e.g. regulated finance) inform how we think about evidence and governance — the product narrative stays horizontal: goals down to tasks, across the tools you already run.
Same data. Different question.
CEO sees: Strategic bets and board- or client-facing narrative traced to shipped work — not “we’re shipping a lot.”
CFO sees: Engineering spend and headcount mapped to the portfolio and roadmap you funded — not another productivity vanity chart.
CPO sees: Roadmap commitments vs where capacity actually went — before missed dates become customer or revenue risk.
CTO / VPE sees: Where execution drifts off initiatives while delivery metrics still look healthy — early enough to replan.
Leads sees: Clarity on what to stop calling “almost done” when the artefact trail says otherwise.
Primary question
Bottom-up
How fast / how much (DORA, velocity)
SHIP
Are we doing what we said mattered?
Direction of reasoning
Bottom-up
Activity metrics → infer success
SHIP
Leadership intent → classify work
Executive output
Bottom-up
Dashboards & meetings
SHIP
Decision-ready morning brief
Drift
Bottom-up
Quarterly or ad hoc
SHIP
Surfaced within days when signals allow
Optimises for
Bottom-up
Throughput and busyness
SHIP
Alignment to goals
Your guess is probably wrong
When part of the team works on the wrong initiatives, velocity and DORA scores still look fine — payroll does not. The arithmetic is simple, and usually larger than the number in your head. Move the sliders and check.
Estimated annual cost of misalignment (illustrative)
$1,080,000
30 engineers × $120,000 avg salary × 30% on the wrong priorities
This is a back-of-the-envelope figure, not a quote — your real number depends on your team and your initiatives. But if even a fraction of it is real, the cost of seeing it sooner is small by comparison. See how SHIP surfaces it.
Senior pricing. No spreadsheet.
One platform fee scoped to your org — not a per-seat calculator you have to reverse-engineer.
Startup
For scale-up engineering orgs.
- ✓ Morning brief + drift signal
- ✓ Chat + MCP — ask in Claude, Cursor & VS Code
- ✓ All connectors: GitHub, GitLab, Jira, Confluence, Slack, Linear, Notion
- ✓ People intelligence — 1:1 prep, roles & skills
- ✓ Knowledge base & search
- ✓ Bring your own Anthropic key & models
Enterprise
For larger or regulated orgs.
- ✓ Everything in Startup
- ✓ SSO & SCIM
- ✓ Audit export
- ✓ SOC 2 / ISO 27001 / DORA evidence
- ✓ Data residency
- ✓ Priority support & onboarding
Building with us early? Founding design partners get pricing below our standard rate — by application.
Built by engineers from Deutsche Bank, Revolut, Vega, and Capital.com — where “trust me” was never an acceptable answer.
Built by someone who's been
on your side of the table
SHIP comes from years leading engineering in the most regulated, highest-stakes corners of finance — market making, derivatives risk, brokerage and trading platforms across multiple asset classes and jurisdictions. The problem it solves was learned at that scale: how quietly real work drifts from intent once the stakes and the headcount get large.
“At scale-up after scale-up I watched leaders run on narrative — standups, decks, green dashboards — while the artefact trail told a different story. The painful part was never typing code faster; it was discovering three weeks before a release that we were building the wrong thing. SHIP exists to collapse that gap: goals at the top, evidence from Git and Jira and docs below, drift in the open before it is expensive.”
Want to talk to someone who's built this before?
Book a 30-minute discovery call. No pitch deck, no script — a working session on whether top-down alignment fits your org — with someone who has led large product-engineering teams in regulated fintech.
Book a Discovery Call
Become a
design partner
SHIP is in private pilot — limited slots for engineering leaders who want a chief of staff for their org, with direct working sessions and founding-partner pricing. Briefs, chat, 1:1 prep and drift — without another dashboard graveyard.
-
Direct founder access
Weekly working sessions — your reality lands in product, not a support queue.
-
Shape what we build
Initiative workflows, brief formats, and connector priorities reflect what works for your team first.
-
Founding-partner pricing
Pricing below our standard rate, locked while we build together — terms we offer now don't come back later.
-
Peer cohort
Engineering leaders running top-down alignment in production — compare notes off the record.
No credit card required. Private pilot. Limited spots.
Something went wrong submitting your application. Please try again, or email hello@shipplatform.ai.
Application received.
We'll reply within 48 hours. Onboarding design partners in Q3 2026.
Application received.
We'll reply within 48 hours. Onboarding design partners in Q3 2026.
Or book a discovery call nowLaunch updates only — no working partnership commitment.
Something went wrong. Please try again, or email hello@shipplatform.ai.
You're on the waitlist — we'll send launch updates before Q3 2026.