SaaS Company Application Portfolio Rationalization
A high-growth SaaS provider rationalized 200+ internal applications accumulated through rapid hiring and acquisitions.
Client Context
A high-growth SaaS provider scaling past two thousand employees accumulated two hundred fourteen internal applications through acquisitions and team autonomy—Slack bots, shadow CRMs, duplicate analytics. Larkinized supported the CFO mandate to cut run-rate before the next funding round.
Challenge
Engineering resisted central catalogs as bureaucracy; finance could not attribute spend to products. Integration debt slowed feature delivery; security flagged unsanctioned tools with customer data.
Approach
LeanIX discovery plus owner surveys built defensible inventory in six weeks. TIME classification workshops with VP Engineering prioritized retirements. We tied rationalization to product P&L owners, not central IT police. Quick win: consolidated observability and CI tools saving seven figures annually.
Architecture Decisions
Standard stacks for CRM, HR, and observability; exception process with CISO sign-off; API keys rotated via corporate vault. Architecture principles published in Backstage alongside service catalog.
Outcomes
Applications reduced from two hundred fourteen to ninety-seven. License savings of two point eight million annually. Engineering productivity index improved twenty-two percent after tool noise dropped.
Lessons Learned
Product P&L ownership of internal SaaS spend changes behavior—central mandates fail. Pair rationalization with approved alternatives ready day one.
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