The Parchment transformation

Parchment is an academic credentialing SaaS platform. Over nearly twelve years there, Phil scaled engineering and technology from roughly 20 to more than 100 people across 10+ countries, through nine acquisitions, a $200M recapitalization, and the company’s $835M acquisition by Instructure.

The transformation moved the organization from waterfall and siloed functional teams to Agile, Lean, DevOps, and flow-based delivery, using value stream management to improve visibility, reduce friction, and strengthen end-to-end delivery. Short-lived project teams gave way to durable, cross-functional teams organized around products and business capabilities, and the platform itself modernized from a co-located monolith to cloud-managed microservices.

The thread the case studies pick up is measurement. Parchment replaced legacy, individual output measures, and an internally built metrics solution, with outcome-driven, team-level flow metrics: visibility into bottlenecks across the whole delivery system, and teams owning their own improvement.

The most recent chapter is AI. Beginning in 2023, before it became an industry mandate, Parchment established responsible AI adoption: AI literacy and champion-led experimentation, assisted delivery and agentic prototyping, secure-development controls with IP and PII protections, human review, and measurement of adoption, impact, cost, and quality.

The results: delivery moved from two annual batch releases to multiple daily deployments, lead time fell 80%, and the organization grew to more than 3,000 production changes a year while maintaining approximately 95% change quality, a near-zero defect backlog, and 99.98% uptime.