The Problem
When HireRight grew through acquisitions, it inherited the technology stacks that came with them — including five separate sales tax calculation tools. SureTax, Avalara, and others had accumulated over time with no strategic rationale for keeping them all. Each vendor had its own contract, integration, and maintenance overhead, and the functionality across tools significantly overlapped.
The result: the company was paying for the same capability multiple times, with no clear owner and no plan to rationalize it.
The Approach
This was my first major product engagement at HireRight, and it was a discovery-first project. Rather than defaulting to a vendor recommendation, I started by mapping what each tool actually did — and more importantly, what it would take to retire it.
I partnered with Finance, Engineering, and Legal to conduct structured discovery: understanding the pain points each team experienced, identifying which tools were truly load-bearing versus redundant, and evaluating whether a single vendor could absorb the functionality of the others without gaps.
The core question I was answering wasn’t “which tool is best” — it was “what is the minimum viable vendor footprint that covers our tax calculation needs with no strategic compromise?”
After working through the consolidation scenarios, the recommendation was to move from five tools to two — retaining the vendors that covered the broadest functional surface area and had the strongest compliance posture, while eliminating the rest.
The Outcome
- $100K+ in projected annual savings from eliminated vendor licenses
- 5 tools consolidated to 2 — a clear, rationalized vendor strategy
- Delivered a full product proposal and consolidation roadmap handed off to the execution team
- Established a framework for evaluating future vendor overlap as M&A activity continues
What I Learned
The hardest part of this project wasn’t the analysis — it was getting three teams (Finance, Engineering, Legal) to agree on what “good enough” meant. Each had different definitions of risk. Finance wanted cost savings. Engineering wanted fewer integrations. Legal wanted compliance coverage. The strategy only worked because I could translate each constraint into terms the others understood.
Discovery-led PM work doesn’t always end with a launched product. Sometimes the most valuable deliverable is a clear, defensible recommendation that saves the organization from a decision they didn’t know they were avoiding.