Dan Ott has been at Planning Center for 13 years, since he was engineer number eight. Today, the engineering organization has grown to over 100 engineers, with teams each given the room to solve the problems in front of them.
The company ships on a 4-day work week, favors async communication, and has run continuous deployment long enough that it’s just how they build software. Engineers tend to stay a long time, and Dan plans to retire here.
It’s an approach that has worked for the business, too: Planning Center’s software has grown to serve over 100,000 churches worldwide, largely through product-led growth and word of mouth.
Most organizations come to Swarmia with a specific problem to fix, but Planning Center came because they wanted to stay as good as they already were.
Good vibes and best intentions
When Dan first read Accelerate, he went through the list of practices at the back — 24 or so things high-performing engineering organizations do — and checked off the ones their teams were already doing informally, without having named them. They already did the majority. “That’s why it feels good to work here,” he said.
However, instincts that work at 20 people get harder to trust at 100, and Planning Center needed a way to add a touch of structure without adding overhead for their teams.
We made decisions on good vibes and best intentions, and years of staying close to our customers meant we were generally right. Swarmia anchored those vibes toward something concrete, a check on where we might be living in blind spots.
Senior Engineering Manager at Planning Center
Dan’s weekly habit with Swarmia is deliberately unstructured. He opens it without a goal in mind and starts with the pull requests view — specifically stale PRs. Before, catching a stuck pull request meant going into GitHub and running a manual query across projects: work you’d only do when something had already started to feel off. When all it takes is looking at a signal in Swarmia, you find out about it much sooner.
Something I always come back to is the stale pull requests view. That’s the most useful one — why is this stuck? Why is this stalled out?
Senior Engineering Manager at Planning Center
Anything that stands out gets passed to the relevant EM loosely — “Hey, I noticed X and it’s making me think Y, but it’s your team, so you tell me.” Sometimes it’s an anomaly with an obvious explanation, and it always opens a useful conversation.
Investment balance changed the narrative
Planning Center is product-driven, and the team gravitated to talking about new things — sometimes forgetting to put enough emphasis on the foundational, but less shiny work that happens under the surface. Swarmia’s investment balance helped teams understand where engineering effort was really going, so they could make better decisions about allocating effort.
The default story was that we were always focused on new features. But when we looked at the investment balance data, we discovered we actually spend more time than the industry norm on keeping the lights on. The features are just what’s exciting to talk about.
Senior Engineering Manager at Planning Center
Getting an accurate picture of where time was actually going meant the maintenance work could finally be talked about, not just done.
Surveys as a shared view of reality
Planning Center runs bi-annual developer experience surveys in Swarmia, with participation above 85%. Dan’s read on their high response rate is that people feel safe sharing their opinions. For a distributed team that already runs on async communication and direct feedback, that culture predates the surveys.
We’ve really been enjoying Swarmia surveys. They’re easy for the teams to complete, and they create a shared view of reality for anchoring our conversations.
Senior Engineering Manager at Planning Center
When results come back to the engineering leadership team, the conversation centers on which findings they want to prioritize improvements for — and whether doing so serves any of Planning Center’s three priorities: their products, their team, or the churches they serve.
Paying people to learn
Planning Center’s engineers are all over the bell curve on AI. Early adopters experimenting at one end, people still recalibrating at the other. For Dan, the response to both is the same: your job right now is to learn how these tools can accelerate and amplify our mission of helping churches help people.
Dan believes that leadership has an opportunity and obligation to adopt AI without sacrificing care for the people on his team, or the people they serve. Planning Center is making AI fluency a real part of the job, not a side project or optional enrichment. “The opportunity to up-skill is on-the-job learning available to everyone,” he said.
He’s listening to both ends of the hype. The enthusiasts promising outsized productivity gains: prove us right. The skeptics who’ve had bad experiences and written it off: prove us wrong. He wants to anchor both camps in what the data actually shows — which is why they’re starting to use Swarmia’s AI impact views to understand what their teams are actually using, and how it’s impacting their workflows. Claude Code is the direction they’re headed; and the data helps them see what that transition looks like across over 100 engineers.
But beneath the tooling decisions, Dan’s concern is less about which tools win out than about the direction of the acceleration: toward better collaboration with people, or toward treating them as abstractions that deliver output. He’d rather build toward the former.
I’d rather use tools to help people than use people to help tools.
Senior Engineering Manager at Planning Center
That philosophy runs through everything Planning Center does — how they structure their teams, how they approach AI, and how they use Swarmia. A tool that doesn’t replace their instincts, but makes sure those instincts are still right, and aimed at helping the real people on the other end.
