Technical Due Diligence for Small Acquisitions: A Developer’s View

Technical due diligence sounds like something for bankers and lawyers, but a lot of the work sits with engineers. If your company is looking at buying a small product or platform, at some point someone will ask you to look at the code, the infrastructure, and the team and say whether the deal makes sense from a technical side. In practice you usually want answers to three basic questions: What are the main technical risks in this system? How do those risks affect what the buyer is paying and expecting? What work will the engineering team have to do after closing? This is a look at those questions for SMB-scale deals from a developer’s point of view. SMB vs Enterprise: Same Idea, Different Scale Most public material on tech DD comes from large deals: private equity, corporate roll-ups, multi-region IT. That setup assumes many systems, many teams and months of coordinated work. A small acquisition is different. Often there is one core product, a primary codebase and a small engineering t