How FactoryFix drives alignment and engineering productivity improvements with Swarmia

Tim Nott, CTO of FactoryFix, leads a fully remote organization of 10+ software engineers split into three feature teams that are building the leading SaaS product for manufacturing recruitment. Together, Tim and Engineering Manager Eduardo Bilk started looking for a tool that would help them align engineering with the business and gain visibility into the process bottlenecks that were getting in the way of their teams.

Tim’s main goal was to find a solution that would help communicate engineering progress and priorities to the non-engineering leadership. He wanted to identify a set of key metrics that would help the engineering organization not only measure but also improve its delivery time.

We’re fighting the age-old battle of trying to align development with how the rest of the business talks about itself. The problem is, it’s hard to find good metrics. We want to get to a point where we can confidently talk to the CEO and Head of Sales about the metrics we’re tracking and demonstrate how we’re using them to get features out faster.

Tim Nott
CTO

FactoryFix is known for its culture of high ownership and transparency. As the engineering leader, Tim was looking to bring the same degree of transparency into engineering that the other departments were already able to offer.

All our sales, customer success, and marketing metrics are displayed and shared with everyone in the company. Dev is the hardest thing to give transparency to, and so we tried using Shortcut as our transparency tool. The problem is, it doesn’t allow us to see in real time when things are starting to slip. I want to be able to spot and communicate that instantly, as opposed to having to wait until we’ve already missed a deadline.

Tim Nott
CTO

Instead of having to wait for a post-mortem to analyze what went wrong, Tim and Eduardo were hoping to become more proactive about catching blockers and communicating about unexpected delays to internal stakeholders.

Once upon a time I was able to look at every single project and see where the chokeholds were. Now, finding those pain points has gotten increasingly more complicated. I want to have a tool that helps me work with dev leads and say like ‘hey, whatever we’re doing over here is not working, let’s figure out a way to move this along.

Tim Nott
CTO

Improving transparency, predictability, and delivery

Around the time Tim and Eduardo started looking into engineering productivity tools, they were also working on switching from Shortcut to Linear and adopting Shape Up as their software development methodology. They started off by comparing Swarmia, LinearB, and GitClear, but quickly chose Swarmia as the most suitable tool for achieving the outcomes they were after.

Early on in the evaluation process, Tim and Eduardo were impressed by the visibility Swarmia was able to provide to not only the engineering teams but also the rest of the business.

Instantly, Swarmia gave us a baseline, and we could see historical information on where we were in terms of metrics. We wanted to make those metrics available to the teams so they could reflect on their own work but also to the executive team to help them better understand bottlenecks in the delivery process.

Tim Nott
CTO

The insights in Swarmia also turned out to be useful in supporting the conversations Tim was having in the leadership team.

One of our hypotheses is that there are things we can do in our process to make delivery better. The other hypothesis is that some of the expectations from the business may be unrealistic and that we might need more resources or more senior resources to reach our goals. Swarmia makes those conversations easier and allows us to pull the right levers at the right time.

Tim Nott
CTO

Eduardo, on the other hand, quickly got into the habit of using Swarmia’s Daily Digests in Slack to understand work in progress and unblock team members who needed unblocking. The scheduled recaps in Slack help Eduardo stay on top of the work his team is doing.

The Daily Digest is our favorite — not having to leave Slack to see what you have to do is awesome.

Eduardo Bilk
Engineering Manager

During the trial period, Eduardo spent some time on comparing LinearB’s and Swarmia’s Slack notifications to one another. He found that LinearB’s notifications felt punitive and complicated, whereas the ones in Swarmia were more straightforward and actionable.

In addition to interacting with Swarmia’s Slack app, Eduardo also likes to look at the Work Log to get a quick visualization of how the work is moving forward.

Swarmia has become a part of my day-to-day work. I log in to Swarmia and I see how the teams are doing and I look at the Work Log to see what they’re working on.

Eduardo Bilk
Engineering Manager

Immediate ROI with 25% drop in cycle time and replacing daily stand-ups with Swarmia’s Daily Digests

Since FactoryFix’s Swarmia adoption coincided with their implementation of the Shape Up methodology, they’ve been able to prove the new methodology’s impact on the speed of delivery. After the first 90 days of using Swarmia and Shape Up, the FactoryFix engineering teams saw an average of 25% drop in their pull request cycle times and a 9% increase in their review rate.

Our goal with Shape Up is to deliver as fast as we can. Ever since we adopted it, we’ve definitely felt the review rate improving because we used to only have a few people reviewing code and now code reviews are more distributed. We can clearly see these improvements in Swarmia.

Eduardo Bilk
Engineering Manager

Additionally, with Swarmia’s Daily Digests in every team’s Slack channel, each engineering team has been able to skip their daily stand-ups and reduce the number of recurring meetings.

We saw an immediate return on investment. While the product has many great features, the team-by-team daily recap in Slack eliminates the need for stand-ups. Now we do meetings on an as-needed basis if it looks like we might not deliver on time.

Tim Nott
CTO

During the next 12-24 months, Tim is looking to significantly grow the engineering organization. While he knows that such rapid growth comes with its own challenges, he’s also committed to scaling the engineering organization sustainably by understanding the impact of each new hire.

At our stage, growing engineering is never a nice steady march. One of the things I’m most excited about is using Swarmia to see what the addition of a body to a team does to our stats. It’s great for us to hire an experienced developer but it’s even greater to understand the impact that has on delivery. I know we’re going to be in good shape if we use Swarmia to support our growth.

Tim Nott
CTO