THE FIRST 90
A clear action plan
and an honest baseline for your first 90 days
in a new role.
Every new leader has the same problems:
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filtered/opaque information,
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inherited commitments, and
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pressure to show direction before you fully understand the landscape.
We cut through that in 3 to 5 weeks with an unfiltered diagnostic, a ranked set of priorities, and a stress-tested plan you can execute starting immediately.
CONDITIONS FOR INTERVENTION
You need this
when you are dealing with...
Inherited Complexity
You’ve stepped into a role with active initiatives, vendor commitments, and team dynamics you didn’t choose — and you need to sort signal from noise fast.
Compressed Expectations
Leadership, the board, or the market expects visible strategic direction within your first quarter. The clock started before you did.
Unclear AI Landscape
Your organization has AI efforts, but no one can give you a clear, honest picture of what’s real, what’s performative, and what’s worth your attention.
No Independent Baseline
Everything you know about the current state comes from people with a stake in the current state. You need an unfiltered view before you commit to a direction.
Listening Trap
You are doing the right thing by listening, but the longer synthesis takes, the more it can be misread as indecision or lack of command.
Blind-Spot Risk
Competitive threats, capability gaps, and hidden vulnerabilities rarely surface cleanly through internal briefings alone.
WHAT YOU GET
A strategic foundation you can act on.
You don’t get a generic onboarding playbook.
You get an independently constructed strategic foundation that offers a clear view of the situation, a sharp strategic narrative, and a realistic plan for early traction.
Current-State Diagnostic
An unvarnished assessment of where things actually stand: capabilities, talent alignment, competitive positioning, initiative health, and the gap between the internal narrative and reality.
Strategic Priority Map
A clear articulation of the 3–5 priorities that matter most in your first 90 days, scored against feasibility, organizational readiness, and leadership impact. Sequenced so early wins build credibility for harder moves later.
AI Landscape Assessment
A practical evaluation of how AI is currently being used across the organization, where the real opportunities are, and what you need to understand to lead AI-related decisions with confidence — regardless of your technical background.
90-Day Execution Roadmap
30/60/90-day milestones with named owners, specific metrics, governance checkpoints, and a stakeholder communication framework. Not an aspiration document — a plan you can execute on starting the week it’s delivered.
METHODOLOGY
Three stages. Three to five weeks.
One clear plan.
01
Strategic intake
Week 1-2
Direct conversations with your peers, leadership, and 3–5 key stakeholders. Review of existing plans, budgets, org structure, active initiatives, as well as an outside-in market/ competitive analysis. The goal: an honest, unfiltered picture of the landscape you’re walking into — including what no one has said out loud yet.
02
Diagnostic and Prioritization
Week 2-3
Each inherited initiative and proposed priority evaluated against strategic fit, execution risk, organizational readiness, and near-term impact. AI capabilities mapped against real opportunities, not vendor promises. The output: a ranked set of priorities with the supporting logic for each.
03
Planning and alignment
Week 3-5
A working session with you to pressure-test the plan before it goes live. We build the 30/60/90-day roadmap together — not as a presentation, but as a decision-making session where the trade-offs get resolved and the path forward gets locked. You leave with a plan you own, not one you were handed.
IMPACT
What changes afterward.
We replace inherited ambiguity with credible early momentum. The difference is visible in speed, alignment, decision quality, and executive confidence.
Priorities based on independent evidence, not inherited assumptions.
A credible strategic narrative you can present to leadership and the board within weeks.
Early wins identified and sequenced to build political capital and organizational momentum.
Clarity on the AI landscape so you can lead technology decisions with confidence, not delegation.
BEFORE THE FIRST 90
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You’re absorbing information from people who each have a reason to frame things a certain way
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The previous strategy exists in slide decks, but its connection to actual resource allocation is unclear.
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AI initiatives are in motion, but no one can give you a straight answer on what’s working.
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The pressure to show direction is building, but acting without a baseline risks committing to the wrong things.
AFTER THE FIRST 90
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You have an independently built view of the organization (gaps, capabilities, and political dynamics) that you can trust.
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Clearly defined priorities, sequenced milestones, and a stakeholder communication plan.
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You understand the AI landscape well enough to lead the conversation, ask the right questions, and make informed resource decisions.
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Your early moves are designed to build credibility and momentum.
DIFFERENTIATED APPROACH
Independent judgment for high-stakes transitions.
Direct Senior Access
No junior staff, no handoffs. The person who scopes the engagement is the person who conducts the interviews, builds the diagnostic, and delivers the plan.
No Agenda But Yours
We don’t sell implementation services, staff augmentation, or technology platforms. The plan we build is designed around your success, not selling you our next engagement.
Decision-Grade Rigor
We favor hard prioritization, clear tradeoffs, and realistic roadmaps over broad transformation theater and bloated PowerPoint deliverables.You get analysis you can defend, not opinions you have to trust.
NOT THIS
Large Firm Approach
Months of “discovery,” a 200-page situation assessment authored by junior analysts (and their AI tools), and a transition plan that reads like it was a cut/paste for a different company (because it was).
INSTEAD THIS
The
First 90
Focused, high-intensity, senior-led weeks of direct engagement designed to give you an honest foundation and a plan you can execute to create early moves that build towards lasting momentum.
I built Vorpal Hedge for leaders
who need the truth early,
before politics harden into "strategy."
Every new leader deserves
a view of the landscape that isn’t shaped by
someone’s else's agenda, budget, or career.
That’s what I provide:
clarity without an agenda,
fast enough to matter.
Led by Iliya Rybchin
FOUNDER & PRINCIPAL
Top 25 AI Consultants & Thought Leaders
Consulting Magazine 2025
FREQUENTLY ASKED QUESTIONS
Common questions, straight answers
The bottleneck in most executive transitions isn’t time; it’s access and candor.
Internal teams take months because they’re navigating politics while gathering information. We don’t have that constraint. Three to five weeks of direct, focused engagement with the right people produces a more honest baseline than three months of internal consensus-building.
First 90 is intentionally scoped to answer a specific set of questions quickly: what you inherited, what matters now, what can wait, and how to create traction without unnecessary political damage.Coaching helps you think. Onboarding helps you orient.
First 90 is a strategic intervention. It combines outside-in diagnostic work, market and capability analysis, stakeholder synthesis, and roadmap design to produce a concrete operating view and action plan.
The output is not advice in the abstract. It is a clear set of priorities and moves.
Yes. The First 90 is built for any senior leader stepping into a consequential role, regardless of function.
AI is included because it’s now a factor in virtually every leadership mandate, but the core of the engagement is strategic: understanding your landscape, setting priorities, and building a credible plan. We calibrate the AI component to your role and your level of technical fluency.Direct access to you and a focused group of stakeholders who understand what is actually happening across the business. That typically means 4-6 people across the relevant functions, plus any core planning materials, initiative summaries, or vendor commitments that shape the current landscape. Preparation time is limited. The process is designed to extract signal quickly. We work around their schedules and keep interviews focused.
Engagements costs typically vary depending on the number of active initiatives, organizational complexity and the depth & breadth of the analysis you require. We agree a fixed fee before work begins. There are no hourly charges and no incentive to extend beyond what’s needed.
That's the most common situation. The engagement is designed for organizations that already have initiatives in motion. The question we are answering is which ones deserve to continue and which ones don't. Existing projects aren't a complication. They're the input.
Rapid Triage is useful when leadership needs a one-week first-pass read on a situation that is still fuzzy or not yet fully scoped. First 90 makes sense when the triggering event is clear: a new role, expanded responsibility, or an urgent need to establish direction quickly. If you are unsure which is right, that can usually be determined in a short call.
Yes. If you’re stepping into a role that includes some responsibility for an AI or you feel there are areas where AI will impact your function, The First 90 and the Strategic Intervention can be scoped together.
The First 90 gives you the broad strategic foundation; the Strategic Intervention goes deep on the AI investment portfolio. We scope the combination based on what your transition actually requires.You receive a prioritized strategic plan, an AI landscape assessment, a 90-day execution roadmap, and every framework and tool we built during the engagement — yours to keep and customize. Some clients move into a quarterly advisory arrangement. Others execute independently and return when the next inflection point arrives. The goal is to leave you equipped to lead without us.
Internal teams have two constraints that are hard to overcome: proximity to the decisions already made, and organizational stakes in the outcome. Both limit candor. The value of an independent view is not that it's smarter. It's that it has no agenda. That changes what gets said out loud.
Completely. There are no client names used in marketing, no published case studies without explicit permission, and no sharing of internal information with third parties. New-role transitions are politically sensitive by nature. The work only functions if candor and discretion are absolute.
Internal transitions are often harder than external ones because you carry the baggage of existing relationships and perceived allegiances. An independent diagnostic is arguably more valuable in this situation because it gives you permission to challenge inherited assumptions without it being read as a political move.
The process is the same; the dynamics are different, and we account for that.