2023 was a year of change and growth for us as we set our sights on supporting more leadership use cases, grew the team with several key hires, and introduced a slew of new features to the product. In our traditional year in review post, I’ll briefly cover the highlights of the year that was.
Welcoming larger customers, new investors, and key hires across the business
In 2023, we spent a considerable amount of time making the product — as well as our processes — ready for the scale required for supporting companies with thousands of engineers. Largely thanks to those feature and performance improvements, we were able to onboard hundreds of new customers from modern growth companies, like Matillion, TrueLayer, and Honeycomb, as well as enterprises — the largest of which employs 15,000+ people across 25 countries.
To support our expansion upmarket, we raised a funding round from Dig Ventures, joined by all of our existing investors. As a serial entrepreneur, I’ve learned the importance of choosing your investors carefully. The team at Dig Ventures includes Ross Mason (founder of MuleSoft) and Rytis Vitkauskas (formerly a Partner at Lightspeed and a founder himself).
Over the year, we also paid homage to our roots by spinning up a new product team dedicated to serving our ever-growing developer audience. To this day, nearly 50% of our monthly active users are software engineers, who continue to use Swarmia to speed up their daily workflows.
In addition to the product managers, designers, software engineers, account executives, and customer success managers we hired to support the needs of our growing customer base, we also appointed Rebecca Murphey as Field CTO. Working at the intersection of our product and customers teams, her role is to help our customers — as well as the market at large — adopt healthy ways to continuously improve engineering effectiveness.
New features for engineering leaders, team leads, and software engineers
As a part of our initiative to support larger customers, we recognized the need to add new leadership-facing capabilities to Swarmia. Chief among those changes were a major update to Investment Balance, the new Initiatives feature, and the possibility to use data from Swarmia as the basis for audit-ready software cost capitalization reports.
In addition to the leadership-focused features, we continued to innovate for software engineers as well as their team leads and managers. As a testament to that work, the Swarmia Slack bot sent a total of 3.6 million messages, almost tripling the number of Slack nudges sent last year.
Our most-anticipated new capabilities for software engineers and managers include the Developer Overview and CI Insights.
Just like last year, we also made time to deliver 2023 Reviewed — a personal Slack notification recapping the work engineers did over the past 12 months. This time, we also introduced a new team notification, shining light on some of the great work each team did during the year.
89 G2 reviews, new podcast, our own book, and our first foray into original research
The product and engineering teams weren’t the only ones who knocked it out of the park this year. Our marketing and customers teams were equally busy delighting our new and existing customers with great content, customer service, and original research.
Thanks to the amazing work our customers team does every day, we ended the year with 89 new positive customer reviews on G2.
In June, we launched Engineering Unblocked, a podcast dedicated to sharing the stories of engineering leaders who’ve successfully navigated challenges of scale, complexity, and growth. We wrapped up Season 1 with the 10th episode in December, and are already working towards launching Season 2 in early 2024.
In October, we published the first edition of our book, Build: Elements of an Effective Software Organization. We ran out of the physical copies in two days, but are working on a new and improved second edition. You can read the first edition for free on our website, pre-order the Kindle version, or sign up to hear when the paperback version is back in stock.
We also worked with our friends at LeadDev to publish our first piece of original research on engineering team performance. You can read a recap with our main findings or download the full report — no email address required.
Looking forward to an even brighter 2024
As we’re wrapping up a successful 2023, we’re starting to look forward to an even better 2024. Next year, we’ll work on a bunch of exciting new features, allowing you to run engineering surveys, perform sprint analysis, and connect your Swarmia data to any warehouse, dashboard, or internal system with the Data Cloud.
If you’d like to join the ride in one way or another, we’d be happy to show you around the product or invite you to explore open positions in our team.
