12 lessons · about 176 minutes of reading · complete

Build the instrument before anyone asks for one.

You have never run a due diligence. Reading about diligence will not fix that, because nobody hires on reading — the gap closes the moment you are holding a draft of the artifact the job would ask you to produce. This course builds one thing: a one-page front-end and UX diligence scorecard, four axes, red/amber/green, with a remediation estimate in weeks. By the end it exists, it has been run against a real product, and the line on your CV that currently says nothing says “here is mine.”

Start lesson one: Who reads it, and what it changes →

What this course is not

A technical due diligence is one workstream inside a much larger commercial and financial process — market and customer diligence, financial and accounting diligence, legal, tax, insurance, environmental. You will not be running that process, and nothing here prepares you to. What you can own is the front-end and UX half of the technical workstream: what the interface costs to change, whether anyone here knows what users do, and whether an agent could ever act inside this product.

That is a genuinely useful thing to be the person for, and it is narrow. Claiming more than it in a room full of people who do this for a living is the fastest way to lose the room.

Lessons

The whole twelve-lesson spine is registered here from day one so the numbering never shifts. The first module is ready; ask your teaching agent for the next one once the rubric has its first real entries.

What a diligence is for

Who reads the output, what decision it changes, and the constraints that make this a different craft from reviewing a codebase you own.

The four axes

The four things a front-end and UX diligence actually measures, and what evidence you can get for each without the repository.

The scorecard as a product

Turning four axes of evidence into one page that changes a decision, survives a second reader, and holds up in the room.

How to actually get value from this

Write into the rubric every time. Every lesson ends with an edit to RUBRIC.md. A diligence course you only read leaves you exactly where you started: able to describe an instrument you do not have.
Bring the draft back and ask to be argued with. Paste the rubric into the chat and ask for the management-team response to each finding. That is the room you are rehearsing for.
The instrument is the deliverable, not the reading. A module you finished without changing a single question on the scorecard did not land, however interesting it was.
Cut any question you cannot answer from the outside. The rubric is worth exactly as much as the evidence you can actually get in the time you actually have.

Every claim on these pages links to its source. If a source looks wrong or out of date, check the resource list and tell your teaching agent — the course is meant to be corrected.