How Choco drives transparency, autonomy, and alignment across the organization

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.

GitHub alone doesn’t always reflect the way we work. We wanted to get an aggregated data dashboard that would give us a holistic view into the engineering organization by connecting our pull requests in GitHub with our issues in Jira. Ultimately, our goal was to make engineering work more clear and transparent, and the Jira integration was a major driver for us wanting to replace Haystack.

Matteo Pescarin
Engineering Manager

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.

Haystack is a reporting platform but it doesn’t give us the micro feedback loops that Swarmia does. Of course, we tried to operationalize the insights from Haystack with the engineering managers, but we quickly realized that we could automate some of that with Swarmia and take a lot of the work off our EMs’ plates.

Vignesh Rathika
Senior Technical Program Manager

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.

We want each of the product teams to operate in a way that fits them. The goal of the platform team is to provide them with the tools and insights they need to make sure they can solve all their problems independently. As we grow, we want the teams to be more autonomous, and Swarmia helps with that.

Vignesh Rathika
Senior Technical Program Manager

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.

Swarmia really wins on simplicity and user experience. As I’ve been using it more, I’ve found it fantastic how simple and easy the dashboards are to read at a glance. It also allows me to drill down into details.

Matteo Pescarin
Engineering Manager

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.

At the very beginning when I started using Swarmia, I spotted a number of stale pull requests that had been sitting there for ages and that I had never seen in GitHub. We were immediately able to clean them up.

Matteo Pescarin
Engineering Manager

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.

We had a number of initiatives that we were running outside the planned roadmap, and there was no easy way to see what people were working on. We realized that with Swarmia, these things would just naturally emerge, and now we’re able to get a holistic view of what’s going on.

Matteo Pescarin
Engineering Manager

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.

When we’re looking at the Work Log, it’s absolutely fantastic that the teams are not statically computed but we’re able to form groups that are horizontal. For example, we have a specific team for the front-end group, which spans the whole organization.

Matteo Pescarin
Engineering Manager

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.

The drill-downs and filters, especially for cycle time data, are super useful. For example, with the front-end group, we were able to correlate real data to some of the things they were complaining about, and quickly fix an issue that was getting in their way.

Matteo Pescarin
Engineering Manager

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.

With the help of Swarmia, we’ve managed to keep a much closer eye on PRs in code review, the number of open PRs, and how much time we’re spending on them. These things used to be a big bottleneck for us, and we now have a better understanding of how things are going.

Matteo Pescarin
Engineering Manager

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.

While we’re still in the process of agreeing on the investment categories we’d like to track across the organization in the long term, the conversations we’ve had between the engineering leaders and the product managers have already increased alignment.

Matteo Pescarin
Engineering Manager