First 90 Days After a Tech Deal: A Private Equity Execution Plan

For private equity sponsors, the deal close used to signal the start of a new chapter. Now, it marks the beginning of a sprint. The pace of activity in 2025 has intensified: U.S. deal value topped $838.5 billion last year, and global figures are on track to hit $1 trillion. European PE deal value also rose strongly in 2024 and shows cautious but positive momentum into 2025. But the path to value has become anything but straightforward.

As exit timelines shrink and limited partners’ (LPs) expectations sharpen, financial engineering has taken a back seat. Operational delivery, particularly in the first ninety days, has become the critical battleground for returns. This is not just a change in tactics. It is a shift in mindset.

Execution risk no longer waits until year two. It typically appears within weeks when systems are slower than promised, product roadmaps become vague, or leadership teams start to pull in different directions. These early signals are important because they indicate whether the deal thesis will hold up under real-world pressure.

We have seen this story unfold many times; in fact, we recently wrote about “Why Execution Is the New Differentiator in Private Equity’s Tech Deals.” It’s what turns investment hypotheses into real traction. That multiplier effect does not happen by chance. It begins with structure, speed, and the discipline to turn technical operations into a strategic advantage as early as possible.

The rest of this article walks through that approach. It picks up at day zero and outlines how sponsors can use the first ninety days not simply to integrate, but to accelerate. Because in today’s market, post-close is no longer a cooling-off period. It is a launchpad.

Pre-acquisition: Diagnosing tech risk before it compounds

The sprint to value does not begin on day one. It starts much earlier, during diligence. This is the first moment when an operations partner can shape outcomes, not just by verifying the commercial narrative, but by examining whether the technical foundation can support what the investment thesis requires.

Over the years, working alongside private equity sponsors, we’ve seen where early-stage cracks tend to form. Sometimes it’s a monolithic architecture hidden beneath a modern UI. Other times, it’s a delivery team stretched too thin to scale. In both cases, the real cost comes later, when those gaps slow down product cycles, block integrations, or force a rewrite during a critical inflection point. These risks don’t disappear over time. They accumulate.

This is where structure matters. At Thinslices, we’ve used pre-deal tools that bring more clarity, earlier in the process:

• The Tech Diligence Checklist: focused on fundamentals, this checklist helps evaluate code quality, deployment maturity, test coverage, and security posture. It also probes for signals that the system is AI-ready, such as clean data flows or automation hooks that can support future use cases.
• The Thesis-to-Tech Fit Scorecard: not every technical platform is built to deliver on a growth thesis. This framework assigns a score to factors like scalability, modularity, team maturity, and architectural extensibility. The result is a quantified view of alignment between the deal thesis and the tech reality.

Used correctly, these tools help reduce blind spots and enable investment teams to avoid post-close surprises. Just as important, they create a running start for the next phase, where speed and certainty matter most.

The next section begins at day zero, the moment the deal closes. It is where the sprint becomes real, and where execution must shift from planning to traction.

Day zero to day 30: Stabilize, assess, align

If diligence is about surfacing truth, the first thirty days are about building trust. Once the deal closes, the narrative shifts. What was once a promising asset on paper becomes a live operation with teams, systems, and deadlines already in motion. This is the moment where assumptions meet infrastructure, and where clarity becomes a competitive advantage.

Sponsors who enter this phase with a clear view of technical risk are already ahead. But even the best diligence can only go so far. The early post-close window is where teams discover how decisions were made, where priorities were stretched, and which critical systems are overdue for repair. These discoveries shape the pace of everything that follows.

At Thinslices, we treat this phase as the foundation-setting sprint. The goal is not to impose control, but to create alignment across infrastructure, delivery cadence, and leadership. A well-structured first month sets the tone for the full hold period.

Key focus areas include:

• Infrastructure and access audit: review system architecture, access rights, cloud environments, and deployment paths. This is the starting point for any credible plan to modernize or scale.
• CI/CD validation and tech stack baseline: evaluate whether development workflows support the expected velocity. Look at release frequency, rollback procedures, and test coverage. Clean code matters, but clean process matters more.
• Leadership alignment and role clarity: ensure that product, engineering, and commercial leadership understand the roadmap and their roles in it. This often requires difficult conversations, especially if the incumbent team was operating in survival mode.
• First sprint cadence and delivery rhythm: introduce a predictable cadence for planning, delivery, and reporting. Even if the initial backlog is limited, establishing the rhythm early helps reduce friction as new initiatives come online.

By day 30, the technical baseline should be visible, key risks documented, and leadership aligned around the first set of delivery milestones. This is not yet a turnaround, but it is a reset, one that creates the conditions for acceleration.

The next section builds on this momentum. From days 30 to 60, sponsors move from assessment to intervention. The focus shifts to unblocking teams, modernizing systems, and removing the friction that holds delivery back.

Days 30 to 60: Unblock, modernize, de-risk

With the technical baseline in place and leadership aligned, the focus in weeks five through eight shifts from observation to action. This is the window where teams begin clearing the bottlenecks surfaced during the first month and start laying the groundwork for scale. The goal is not only to fix what is broken, but to create forward momentum that can be measured.

We typically use this phase to target three priorities: reducing risk, accelerating workflows, and setting the stage for product or AI delivery later in the sprint. The objective is to transition the company from stabilizing mode to building mode.

Key actions include:

• Addressing critical bugs and hidden technical debt: high-priority issues that impact availability, performance, or security are resolved first. These fixes may not be visible to customers, but they have a measurable effect on team velocity and confidence.
• Refactoring legacy components: where systems are too rigid to scale, targeted refactoring is introduced. This often includes reworking monolithic services into smaller components or redesigning around more modular, cloud-native patterns.
• CI/CD rebuild and workflow automation: in cases where deployment processes are inconsistent or unreliable, continuous integration and deployment pipelines are rebuilt. This brings stability to releases and creates room for faster iteration cycles.
• AI readiness and data groundwork: for companies with AI on the roadmap, this is the time to prepare data flows and assess candidate use cases. Teams begin validating whether the existing systems can support lightweight experimentation in the next phase.

By the end of week eight, the business should be able to ship small changes reliably, surface real-time metrics, and begin evaluating targeted automation or product improvements. The risk profile has improved. The team has forward motion. And the infrastructure no longer holds the roadmap hostage.

The next thirty days take that progress and convert it into visible traction. With foundations reset and friction points removed, sponsors can now focus on delivering early wins, particularly through AI pilots, MVP launches, and measurable improvements to execution speed.

Days 60 to 90: Show traction, accelerate delivery

The first two phases were about stabilizing and clearing the path. By day sixty, the conditions for momentum are in place. Teams have reestablished trust in their workflows. Infrastructure bottlenecks have been addressed. Technical leadership has a clearer line of sight to execution. Now the focus turns to demonstrating tangible progress and activating the next layer of value.

This phase is where the sprint becomes visible to stakeholders. Board conversations shift from diagnostic updates to delivery milestones. Operating partners begin to see the outlines of the longer-term roadmap. Internally, teams start to build confidence as working software begins to move out the door at a steady pace.

This is where we focus on delivering first wins that confirm the strategic direction and validate the systems built in the previous sixty days. The emphasis is on speed without shortcuts and experimentation with guardrails.

Key actions include:

• AI pilots and workflow automation: based on earlier assessments, one or two high-impact use cases are selected for rapid prototyping. These include invoice automation, churn prediction, or internal knowledge retrieval. The goal is not to over-engineer, but to demonstrate that the organization can deliver AI-enhanced capabilities in production environments within a defined timeframe.
• MVP launch or feature rollouts: with technical debt under control and delivery teams aligned, this period often includes launching the first product iteration tied to the investment thesis. This could be a new onboarding flow, a customer-facing dashboard, or a tool that supports internal decision-making.
• Real-time dashboards and observability: to improve decision quality and reduce blind spots, analytics infrastructure is introduced or refined. Teams can now monitor core workflows in real-time, track the adoption of new features, and identify operational inefficiencies with precision.
• Governance cadence and reporting structure: a rhythm of delivery reviews, sprint retrospectives, and lightweight reporting gives stakeholders early visibility into what is working and where course correction may be needed. This rhythm is crucial for establishing the tone throughout the remainder of the hold period.

By day ninety, sponsors should be able to point to visible progress: features in market, operational improvements underway, and experiments that connect directly to long-term value creation. The platform is no longer reactive. It is directional.

What comes next builds on this foundation. As we move into full-cycle delivery, the focus will shift toward repeatability, scalability, and category leadership. But it is the first ninety days that make that future credible. Because in private equity, value is not captured all at once. It is earned in sprints. And it begins here.

Capturing value: Execution as a strategic differentiator

By the end of the first ninety days, the investment is no longer theoretical. The company has shipped real features, resolved critical technical risks, and begun operating with a clearer rhythm. What started as a diligence checklist has evolved into a working delivery engine. This quiet but decisive transition is where operational value creation begins to separate outperformers from the rest.

Execution, in this context, becomes the differentiator. It turns code quality into shipping velocity. It converts product alignment into commercial relevance. And it transforms early AI use cases from slideware into market-ready prototypes.

This is where a capable software delivery partner can move the needle. At Thinslices, we support sponsors by embedding cross-functional squads of engineers, designers, AI strategists, and product managers directly into portfolio teams. The result is not advisory. It is delivery. Not at some future milestone, but from week one.

Our role is not to displace internal teams, but to accelerate them. We help create the conditions for repeatability. From CI/CD pipelines to platform modernization, from data infrastructure to AI pilots, the focus is on building systems that can sustain value beyond the first quarter.

Private equity’s post-close sprint is not about checking boxes. It is about shifting the asset from theoretical upside to actual performance. When done with structure, speed, and discipline, this sprint becomes a platform for everything that follows.

The first ninety days do not guarantee the outcome. But they do reveal the trajectory. And in today’s market, trajectory is often the most valuable signal a sponsor can generate.