When the Choco engineering team first reached out to Swarmia in 2022, Matteo Pescarin had recently been hired as an Engineering Manager, charged with setting metrics-based objectives, reducing waste, and improving his team’s ability to deliver at speed. Vignesh Rathika was a Senior Technical Program Manager in the Platform team where he looked after the overall productivity of the engineering organization.
Back then, the Choco engineering organization had already laid the foundations for improving transparency, agreeing on what to measure and how, and equipping the teams with the tools they need to continuously improve their processes. They had previously been using Haystack to get rudimentary analytics from GitHub, but were getting increasingly frustrated about the limitations of those reports.
Additionally, Vignesh had noticed that there was a big gap between identifying a problem from one of the reports in Haystack and turning those insights into concrete action points.
As the Choco engineering organization continues to hire and grow to support their zero food waste mission, it was also important for Matteo and Vignesh to find a tool that would promote their culture of autonomy and ownership going forward.
Solution: complete visibility to every level of the engineering organization
Even though Matteo and Vignesh did a high-level comparison of other tools in the market, they quickly came to the conclusion that Swarmia would give them the holistic insights they were after.
One of the first concrete actions Matteo’s team took was cleaning up the old and stale pull requests that had fallen through the cracks over time.
Early on, Matteo was also surprised by the high number of PRs that weren’t mapped to any issues in Jira, which made it difficult to understand the big picture of where engineers were spending their time.
In addition to looking at just one team at a time, both Vignesh and Matteo have really appreciated the flexibility of managing teams and groups of teams in Swarmia.
Matteo has found the advanced filters on the Insights pages particularly useful. They allow him to drill down into problem areas and eliminate bottlenecks that are slowing down a large group of people.
In addition to the more detailed team and group focused views, Matteo and Vignesh have started working on setting up investment categories with the goal of eventually rolling them out to the entire engineering organization. This will allow the enginering and product leadership to clearly see how engineering time is spent and ultimately give them the ability to quantify the value of engineering work to the business.
Results: Streamlined flow of PRs, more ownership for developers, and better strategic alignment
After just a few months of using Swarmia, Matteo has seen a stark improvement in his team’s pull request cycle time. He’s also been happy to see that new PRs are no longer falling through the cracks and that his team has started more systematically linking PRs to issues in Jira.
The engineering managers at Choco have also started socializing the Developer Overview in 1:1s with their teams to promote company’s culture of autonomy and ownership. The view allows developers to celebrate work that they’ve completed, have higher quality career discussions, and reflect on whether they’ve been able to focus on the right things.
Overall, as Choco keeps growing, Matteo and Vignesh feel like Swarmia will continue to act as a catalyst for strategic alignment and the important discussions that need to happen between the engineering and product organizations.
