SuccessionStack: Your next leaders, ready before you need them.

Ryan here. Danielle and I built SuccessionStack, and this is the first time we're putting it in front of a crowd like this one. It started with a question I could never get a straight answer to at the companies I worked with: if one of your key people left on Friday, who actually steps up on Monday? Most places either can't answer it, or they have a spreadsheet someone updates once a year for the executives and then forgets about. And the real exposure is usually a level down, with the people whose departure quietly wrecks a team because nobody saw it coming. SuccessionStack is our shot at fixing that. It scores how much real bench strength you have, points out the roles where you're sitting on a single point of failure, and lets you rate your leaders across eight dimensions so talent reviews turn into something you can act on instead of notes that go nowhere. There's some AI in there too, to suggest who's ready now and to play out what happens if a given person walks. It connects to your HRIS so the data doesn't go stale on you. I'd really like to hear from anyone who has tried to run succession planning before. What made the tools you used painful? And what would it actually take for you to keep something like this up to date, since that seems to be where everyone falls off.