org-health-diagnostic

---
name: org-health-diagnostic
description: Use when assessing overall company health, preparing for a board review, identifying at-risk functions, or when asked for an org health check or health dashboard across all 8 dimensions.
category: C-Level Advisory
version: 1.0.0
tools: []
---

# Org Health Diagnostic

Eight dimensions. Traffic lights. Real benchmarks. Surfaces the problems the founder doesn't know exist.

## Keywords
org health, organizational health, health diagnostic, health dashboard, health check, company health, functional health, team health, startup health, health scorecard, health assessment, risk dashboard

## How to Run It

Ask for the founder's key metrics per dimension (or work from whatever is already known from company context), score each dimension, and produce the dashboard below. Partial data is fine — see Graceful Degradation.

To run a single-dimension deep dive: "Score our [financial|revenue|product|engineering|people|ops|security|market] health."

## The 8 Dimensions

### 1. Financial Health (CFO)
What it measures: can the company fund operations and invest in growth?
- Runway — months at current burn (Green: >12, Yellow: 6-12, Red: <6)
- Burn multiple — net burn / net new ARR (Green: <1.5x, Yellow: 1.5-2.5x, Red: >2.5x)
- Gross margin — SaaS target >65% (Green: >70%, Yellow: 55-70%, Red: <55%)
- MoM growth rate — contextual by stage
- Revenue concentration — top customer % of ARR (Green: <15%, Yellow: 15-25%, Red: >25%)

### 2. Revenue Health (CRO)
What it measures: are customers staying, growing, and recommending?
- NRR (Net Revenue Retention) — Green: >110%, Yellow: 100-110%, Red: <100%
- Logo churn rate (annualized) — Green: <5%, Yellow: 5-10%, Red: >10%
- Pipeline coverage (next quarter) — Green: >3x, Yellow: 2-3x, Red: <2x
- CAC payback period — Green: <12 months, Yellow: 12-18, Red: >18 months
- Average ACV trend — growing, flat, or declining

### 3. Product Health (CPO)
What it measures: do customers love and use the product?
- NPS — Green: >40, Yellow: 20-40, Red: <20
- DAU/MAU ratio — engagement proxy (Green: >40%, Yellow: 20-40%, Red: <20%)
- Core feature adoption — % of users using the primary value feature (Green: >60%)
- Time-to-value — days from signup to first core action (lower is better)
- CSAT — Green: >4.2/5, Yellow: 3.5-4.2, Red: <3.5

### 4. Engineering Health (CTO)
What it measures: can the team ship reliably and sustain velocity?
- Deployment frequency — Green: daily, Yellow: weekly, Red: monthly or less
- Change failure rate — % of deployments causing incidents (Green: <5%, Red: >15%)
- Mean time to recovery (MTTR) — Green: <1 hour, Yellow: 1-4 hours, Red: >4 hours
- Tech debt ratio — % of sprint capacity on debt (Green: <20%, Yellow: 20-35%, Red: >35%)
- Incident frequency — P0/P1 per month (Green: <2, Yellow: 2-5, Red: >5)

### 5. People Health (CHRO)
What it measures: is the team stable, engaged, and growing?
- Regrettable attrition (annualized) — Green: <10%, Yellow: 10-20%, Red: >20%
- Engagement score (eNPS or similar) — Green: >30, Yellow: 0-30, Red: <0
- Time-to-fill (avg days) — Green: <45, Yellow: 45-90, Red: >90
- Manager-to-IC ratio — Green: 1:5–1:8, Yellow: 1:3–1:5 or 1:8–1:12, Red: outside those ranges
- Internal promotion rate — at least 25-30% of senior roles filled internally

### 6. Operational Health (COO)
What it measures: is the strategy being executed with discipline?
- OKR completion rate — % of key results hitting target (Green: >70%, Yellow: 50-70%, Red: <50%)
- Decision cycle time — days from decision needed to decision made (Green: <48h, Yellow: 48h-1w)
- Meeting effectiveness — % of meetings with a clear outcome (qualitative)
- Process maturity — level 1-5 scale
- Cross-functional initiative completion — % on time, on scope

### 7. Security Health (CISO)
What it measures: are customers protected and compliance maintained?
- Security incidents (last 90 days) — Green: 0, Yellow: 1-2 minor, Red: 1+ major
- Compliance status — certifications current/in-progress vs. overdue
- Vulnerability remediation SLA — % of critical CVEs patched within SLA (Green: 100%)
- Security training completion — % of team current (Green: >95%)
- Pen test recency — Green: <12 months, Yellow: 12-24, Red: >24 months

### 8. Market Health (CMO)
What it measures: is the company winning in the market and growing efficiently?
- CAC trend — improving, flat, or worsening QoQ
- Organic vs paid lead mix — more organic = healthier, less fragile
- Win rate — % of qualified opportunities closed-won (Green: >25%, Yellow: 15-25%, Red: <15%)
- Competitive win rate — against primary competitors specifically
- Brand NPS — awareness + preference scores in the ICP

---

## Scoring & Traffic Lights

Each dimension is scored 1-10 with a traffic light:
- Green (7-10): Healthy — maintain and optimize
- Yellow (4-6): Watch — trend matters; improving or declining?
- Red (1-3): Action required — address within 30 days

Overall Health Score: a weighted average of the 8 dimension scores, with weights adjusted by company stage (earlier-stage companies weight Financial and Product Health more heavily; later-stage companies weight Revenue and Operational Health more heavily).

---

## Dimension Interactions (Why One Problem Creates Another)

| If this dimension is red... | Watch these dimensions next |
|-----------------------------|----------------------------|
| Financial Health | People (freeze hiring) → Engineering (freeze infra) → Product (cut scope) |
| Revenue Health | Financial (cash gap) → People (attrition risk) → Market (lose positioning) |
| People Health | Engineering (velocity drops) → Product (quality drops) → Revenue (churn rises) |
| Engineering Health | Product (features slip) → Revenue (deals stall on product) |
| Product Health | Revenue (NRR drops, churn rises) → Market (CAC rises; referrals dry up) |
| Operational Health | All dimensions degrade over time (execution failure cascades everywhere) |

---

## Dashboard Output Format

```
ORG HEALTH DIAGNOSTIC — [Company] — [Date]
Stage: [Seed/A/B/C]   Overall: [Score]/10   Trend: [↑ Improving / → Stable / ↓ Declining]

DIMENSION SCORES
━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━
Financial    🟢 8.2  Runway 14mo, burn 1.6x — strong
Revenue      🟡 5.8  NRR 104%, pipeline thin (1.8x coverage)
Product      🟢 7.4  NPS 42, DAU/MAU 38%
Engineering  🟡 5.2  Debt at 30%, MTTR 3.2h
People       🔴 3.8  Attrition 24%, eng morale low
Operations   🟡 6.0  OKR 65% completion
Security     🟢 7.8  SOC 2 Type II complete, 0 incidents
Market       🟡 5.5  CAC rising, win rate dropped to 22%
━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━

TOP PRIORITIES
🔴 [1] People: attrition at 24% — engineering velocity will drop in 60 days
   Action: CHRO + CEO to run retention audit; target top 5 at-risk this week
🟡 [2] Revenue: pipeline coverage at 1.8x — Q+1 miss risk is high
   Action: CRO to add 3 qualified opps within 30 days or shift forecast down
🟡 [3] Engineering: tech debt at 30% of sprint — shipping will slow by Q3
   Action: CTO to propose debt sprint plan; COO to protect capacity

WATCH
→ People → Engineering cascade risk if attrition continues (see dimension interactions)
```

---

## Graceful Degradation

Not all metrics are needed to run a diagnostic. Handle partial data:
- Missing metric → excluded from score, flagged as "[data needed]"
- Score still valid for available dimensions
- Report flags which gaps to fill for next cycle