Matera is a French startup that's building a SaaS platform for residential property management. Founded in 2017, the team has grown into 200+ people in under four years. Today, Matera serves more than 3,000 residential buildings and 60,000 people. Matera has raised over $55M of funding from investors including Index Ventures, Samaipata, Mubadala Capital, Bpifrance, and Burda Principal Investments.

When Jeremy first contacted Swarmia in early 2021, he was leading a team of 20 high-performing software developers. But as often happens in fast-growing software development teams, review time was at risk of becoming a bottleneck. Additionally, Jeremy wanted to get a clear view on the teams' cycle time from the first commit to when the code is in production.

Having secured $11.2M in funding in early 2020 and being faced with increasing demand from property owners, Jeremy wanted to make sure that the engineering organization is measuring the right things before they begin scaling. This way, they would be able to establish a baseline for what cycle time and review time should look like going forward.

We started looking for a solution that would help us maintain speed without sacrificing culture or quality. We knew we were going to hire dozens of new developers and didn't want our rapid growth to slow us down.

Jeremy Krebs

Co-Founder, CTO

The solution: actionable data for the CTO and Slack notifications for the engineers

After trialing and comparing several different solutions, Jeremy and his team decided to move forward with Swarmia. The decision was largely based on Swarmia’s ability to surface relevant information Jeremy and the engineering managers needed to uncover issues and opportunities throughout the development process.

Additionally, Swarmia was the only tool that allowed the Matera engineering team to keep track of their commonly agreed ways of working. This automated feedback loop quickly turned out to be an invaluable tool for optimizing key metrics like cycle time and throughput.

Jeremy also appreciates Swarmia's focus on team-level metrics over harmful leaderboards that have the tendency to pit developers against each other. Most members of the engineering team, on the other hand, are actively using Swarmia's Slack notifications. Instead of logging into the platform every day, they get daily digests to keep track of the big picture and get personal notifications whenever something requires their attention.

While I'm mainly looking at the Insights view in Swarmia to identify bottlenecks and improvement areas in our processes, most of the engineers are primarily using Swarmia's Slack notifications. They've found both the daily digests and the individual notifications extremely useful for staying on top of their work.

Jeremy Krebs

Co-Founder, CTO

The results: helping a great team become even better

In just three months, Matera was able to reduce cycle time by 48% and cut down review time by 50%.

And while the engineering team has grown from 20 to 45+ developers in seven months, they’ve been able to maintain fast development cycles and keep the average review time under 20 hours. These impressive numbers, in turn, help Matera attract talented developers who are looking to work in a fast-moving and high-performing environment.

In the future, Jeremy plans to also start using the insights Swarmia provides as discussion materials for 1:1s. He sees huge potential in coaching the engineers with the help of carefully selected data points.

In just three months, Swarmia helped us decrease our average cycle time by 48%. As we keep growing, these insights will become increasingly important.

Jeremy Krebs

Co-Founder, CTO