The Story of Allstacks: Building a Platform That Makes Engineering and Business One Train

Hersh Tapadia kept finding himself in the same uncomfortable position: sitting in a room where two groups of smart people spoke completely different languages. On one side, software engineers building features iteratively, shipping constantly, adjusting on the fly. On the other side, pharmaceutical executives who preloaded all their R&D work, ran clinical trials, locked in a formulation, and then manufactured at scale.

This tension would eventually become the foundation for Allstacks, a value stream intelligence platform that’s raised nearly $16 million. But the path required Hersh to spend years translating between worlds that didn’t naturally understand each other.

In a recent episode of Category Visionaries, Hersh shared how his career at the intersection of multiple fields gave him a unique perspective on a problem most people don’t realize exists.

The Pattern That Kept Repeating

Hersh’s background reads like someone who couldn’t pick a lane: electrical engineering, biomedical engineering, tuberculosis diagnostics, pharmaceutical supply chain security, healthcare software. But there was a thread.

“Over the course of my career, I found myself at the intersection of fields a lot,” Hersh explains. “What that ended up exacerbating, as I think about a lot of the problems I ended up solving, was it was how do you translate something from point A to point B?”

After school, he built a tuberculosis diagnostics company using computer vision. That got acquired into Surrex (now Veronetics), where they tackled pharmaceutical supply chain security with technology that could authenticate packaging based on how ink bled into fibers.

But the real challenge wasn’t the technology. It was explaining what they were doing to an industry that thought about building products completely differently. “Fundamentally, the way these things work are different. We think about building software as this continuous process, this Iterative process. But a lot of times, if you’re, say developing a drug, you preload all the R and D work.”

The Dissatisfaction That Started Everything

By the time Hersh left that world, he’d experienced what happens when engineering teams operate disconnected from business context.

“The most dissatisfying thing about engineering for me was context. I felt like were always building, were learning, were being taught to operate in a vacuum as engineers, and it almost made me not want to be an engineer anymore.”

He and his Co-Founder Jeremy Freeman decided to embed themselves directly into engineering teams and listen. “We said, well, we’ll just embed ourselves into different teams. And as we do that, we’ll figure out what people are complaining about, and we’ll solve that problem.”

The Surprise Problem

The consistent complaint wasn’t about velocity or technical debt. It was about managing expectations with stakeholders.

“What everyone was complaining about was ultimately this problem of managing expectations between different stakeholders, because it’s really hard to get a read on what was going on.”

Hersh’s insight went deeper. The issue wasn’t that projects sometimes ran late—every team deals with that. The real problem was the surprise. “When you think about what are you actually upset about? You’re actually upset about the surprise more so than you’re upset about what happened. It’s the way you found out.”

This reframing changed everything. They weren’t building a project management tool. They were building a system to eliminate surprises and keep engineering and business stakeholders aligned.

Building for Adoption, Not Implementation

Earlier value stream management tools required massive change management. Teams had to restructure workflows and force developers into new patterns. Implementation took months.

Hersh took the opposite approach. “We’ve applied this intelligence layer to ValueStream management which is why we call it Value Stream intelligence. And what it allows us to do is it allows us to take this perspective of don’t change anything to get started you just plug in with all stacks.”

By conforming to how teams already work, Allstacks compressed time-to-value. “We find adoption goes a lot faster and value is realized a lot quicker in this agile way rather than this very manual whole hog way that you had to do in the past.”

Waiting for the Market to Catch Up

Between 2018 and 2020, much of Allstacks’s work was market education. “Why do you care about this data? Why is it important that you have this data? Yes, sales and marketing is data driven, but should engineering also be data driven?”

Then something shifted in 2021. “What we found is the market has totally come around to this position where we now when we interface with customers, we’re not teaching people why this data is important, what value they can get from it. What we’re showing them is how they can leverage the data to storytell.”

This market shift accelerated everything. Larger organizations started adopting faster, and the category Allstacks had been patiently developing suddenly had momentum.

The Future: Making Two Trains Into One

Hersh’s vision for Allstacks connects directly back to his early career frustration—the dissatisfaction of building without context, of not understanding how your work connected to the business.

He describes the current state with a vivid metaphor: “If you think about the business and engineering as two trains running on parallel tracks right now in most companies, what happens is those trains are running on these parallel tracks. They look out the window, they can see each other and they’re wondering if they’ll stop at the same station.”

Sometimes they do stop at the same station. Value gets realized, everyone feels good. But most of the time, they’re just hoping for alignment without any real mechanism to ensure it.

Allstacks’s mission is to merge those tracks. “What we want to do is we want to make that one train.”

This means enabling any developer inside an organization to draw a direct line from their daily work to business goals. It means engineering leaders can advocate for resources using data rather than gut feelings. It means business stakeholders can understand what’s happening in engineering without needing to learn Git or read Jira tickets.

The opportunity is massive: helping every engineering organization not just see the value they create, but realize it fully—making engineering an integrated part of the business rather than a separate function that occasionally delivers surprises.

For Hersh, it’s the culmination of everything he found dissatisfying throughout his career. He spent years translating between fields that operated on different rhythms. Now he’s building the platform that makes that translation unnecessary.