Key-person risk intelligence

If your best person quit tomorrow, would you know what breaks?

LinchpinIQ maps the hidden single points of failure in your company — the people whose knowledge isn't written down anywhere — using the systems your team already works in. No surveys. No guesswork. Read-only. Results in two weeks.

Read-only & SOC 2-aligned · Capability-focused, never employee surveillance
Key-Person Risk · Platform team 3 critical SPOFs
MR
Maria R. — Staff Eng
Sole owner: billing core, payment reconciliation
94
Risk
DK
David K. — Infra Lead
Sole owner: deploy pipeline, prod access
88
Risk
JL
Jordan L. — Senior Eng
Shared owner: search, well-documented
31
Risk
The problem

Your most dangerous risk isn't on any dashboard.

Critical knowledge concentrates silently in a few people. Leadership only finds out where — the moment one of them resigns. By then the knowledge is already walking out the door.

1 in 5
key engineers is a true single point of failure — owning critical systems no one else can run. Most leaders can't name them in advance.
$1M+
is the typical fully-loaded cost of losing and replacing a senior knowledge-holder — rehire, ramp, lost velocity, and risk while the gap is open.
Q1
of every diligence process asks "what's your key-person dependency?" Companies that can't answer crisply get marked down or stalled.
How it works

From connect to clarity in two weeks.

LinchpinIQ reads the work your team already produces and turns it into an objective map of where your business depends on single individuals.

1

Connect, read-only

Grant read-only access to the systems you already use — Git, Jira/Linear, your CRM, your docs. Or hand us an export. Nothing is installed on anyone's machine.

Minimum to start: Git + your ticketing system.
2

We build the dependency graph

LinchpinIQ resolves identities across systems and maps who owns what — which systems, clients, and knowledge live in one head and nowhere else. Then it scores every person on criticality × irreplaceability.

Optional overlay: flight-risk signals (tenure, comp percentile).
3

You get the risk map + the fix

A ranked list of your real single points of failure, exactly what breaks if each one leaves, the dollar exposure, and a prioritized 90-day plan to de-risk it.

Delivered as a live dashboard and a board-ready report.
What you get

A risk map you can take to the board.

Every finding is backed by evidence — the actual commits, tickets, and documents that prove the dependency. No black box, no horoscope.

Single-point-of-failure ranking

Your top key-person risks, scored and ordered by how much damage their departure would do.

"What breaks" breakdown

For each critical person: the exact systems, clients, and knowledge that stall the day they leave.

Dollar exposure estimate

The quantified cost of each dependency — so risk becomes a number leadership can act on.

Evidence trail

Every score links to the work artifacts behind it. Defensible in a board meeting or a diligence room.

90-day remediation plan

Prioritized actions — cross-training, documentation, targeted retention — to shrink each risk fastest.

Diligence-ready summary

A one-page key-person posture you can hand an acquirer, investor, or auditor on demand.

Who it's for

Built for the people who lose sleep over this.

CTOs & COOs

Know your fragility before it costs you.

Stop discovering single points of failure during a resignation. Get an objective map of where the business depends on individuals — and a plan to fix the worst of it this quarter.

PE & M&A teams

Score key-person risk across the portfolio.

Run LinchpinIQ on a target before close, or across every portfolio company on a schedule. Turn "key-person dependency" from a gut-feel diligence checkbox into a measured, comparable number.

Trust by design

This maps capability. It is not employee surveillance — and it's built so it can't become it.

Read-only, alwaysLinchpinIQ never writes to your systems and installs nothing on any employee's device.
Capability, not performanceWe measure where knowledge concentrates — not who's "productive." No rankings of individuals' output.
No keystrokes, no sentimentWe never read message content for tone, monitor activity, or track time. Off the table by design.
Aggregate & opt-in readyConfigurable to team-level views and works-council / GDPR requirements out of the box.
Pricing

Start with a snapshot. Scale to always-on.

Most teams start with a one-time audit, see the map, and turn on monitoring once they know what's hiding.

Snapshot Audit
$7.5k one-time
A single, full key-person risk map. The fastest way to see what you're sitting on.
  • Full SPOF ranking + evidence
  • "What breaks" + dollar exposure
  • 90-day remediation plan
  • Board-ready report
  • Delivered in ~2 weeks
Book an audit
Portfolio / PE
Custom
Score key-person risk across every company you own or are evaluating, on one pane.
  • Multi-company rollup
  • Pre-close target assessments
  • Comparable risk benchmarking
  • Diligence-ready outputs
  • Dedicated support
Talk to us
Questions

The things leaders ask first.

Is this spying on our employees?

No — and it's engineered so it can't be. LinchpinIQ measures where knowledge and ownership concentrate, not individual productivity, tone, or activity. It's read-only, aggregate-capable, and built to satisfy works-council and GDPR requirements.

What's the minimum we need to connect?

Just your code repository (GitHub/GitLab) and your ticketing system (Jira/Linear) is enough to map engineering key-person risk. Adding your CRM and docs extends the map to client and institutional-knowledge risk.

How long until we see results?

A Snapshot Audit is delivered in about two weeks from the moment access is granted. Export-based pilots can move faster.

Do you store our source code or customer data?

No. LinchpinIQ analyzes metadata and contribution patterns — who touched what, and how concentrated it is. We don't retain your source code or customer records.

We're heading into diligence. Can this help?

That's one of the most common reasons teams call us. The diligence-ready summary turns "key-person dependency" from an awkward question into a crisp, evidenced answer — and the remediation plan lets you start closing gaps before anyone asks.

Get your risk score

Find out who you can't afford to lose — before they leave.

Tell us where to send your sample risk map. Connect read-only and your real one lands in two weeks. No sales pressure.

See how it works