About

A succession plan should survive a follow-up question.

Most succession plans are a slide deck: a few names in a few boxes, built once for a board meeting and stale within a quarter. SuccessionStack exists because a plan that can't explain itself when someone asks “why him, and not her” isn't a plan — it's a guess with a name attached.

What we're building

SuccessionStack scores every leader against eight weighted leadership dimensions, maps the bench by readiness window (Ready Now, 1 year, 2–3 years), and logs every score and weight change with who made it, when, and why. The goal isn't a prettier slide — it's a plan an HR leader can defend on the spot, to a board, to a skipped-over director, or to the successor who inherits ratings she didn't make herself.

It's built for mid-market HR and People teams (roughly 50 to 5,000 employees) — organizations big enough that succession decisions carry real weight, but too small to justify the succession module buried inside a full HCM suite. It's designed to run alongside an existing HRIS, not replace it.

Who's behind it

SuccessionStack is built by Ryan Grant and Danielle Folsom at The Productive, based in Ottawa, Ontario, Canada. We built the scoring model, the audit trail, and the bench views the way we'd want them to work if we were the HR leader standing in front of the board — because sooner or later, that's exactly who has to trust the number on the screen.

Questions about the product, a demo, or anything else — reach out. A founder reads every message.