Martin Jagusch leads product management for the Developer Experience team at Pleo. The team is part of a platform domain that is responsible for building an internal developer platform that enables nearly 200 software engineers in the Pleo engineering organization to ship customer value quickly and reliably.
Improving engineering effectiveness on a global scale is never an easy feat. At Pleo, it was made even more challenging by the company’s fast growth. The engineering organization alone had doubled in size in just a year, making it more important than ever to not only maintain but also improve the productivity of each team.
Chief among those challenges was a lack of consistency between how the teams approached measuring and improving their ways of working. Over time, it became clear that the engineering organization would benefit from some standardization. This is when Martin and his team started looking for solutions to streamline continuous improvement across the organization.
Clever shortcuts, consistent measurement practices, and higher-quality conversations
Before adopting Swarmia, Pleo’s platform group spent six months on building the foundations for an in-house solution that would give teams more visibility into key engineering metrics, including DORA.
While the work was valuable in that it spurred some important conversations around metric definitions, standard practices, and tooling, Martin quickly realized that the group’s time was better spent elsewhere.
With Swarmia, the Pleo platform domain was quickly able to agree on the definitions of different metrics and find a set of measures that they’d like to track across the organization. Swarmia has brought much-needed consistency to the way engineering work is visualized and measured. The platform domain uses the insights in Swarmia to spot outliers and validate the impact of the internal platform work.
One of the main ways Pleo’s engineering managers and teams interact with Swarmia are the working agreements and two-way Slack notifications that allow teams and individuals to set team-wide targets and receive relevant, real-time nudges.
The platform domain at Pleo has also been able to use the cross-team insights from Swarmia to dig into process bottlenecks that were slowing down the teams. Martin particularly appreciates the way Swarmia acts as a conversation starter in the organization.
96% Swarmia adoption in 3 months, impressive productivity improvements, and exciting new product areas
After a year of using Swarmia, Martin is positively surprised about the results they’ve seen across the Pleo engineering organization. In just three months, 96% of the engineering organization had started using Swarmia and were getting value out of the product.
Consequently, Pleo’s productivity metrics are also trending in the right direction. Most notably, in their first year of using Swarmia, the engineering organization was able to cut its average cycle time by 28% and time to first review by 63%.
Since then, the teams have further managed to reduce their average cycle time to 2.5 days. Yet, more than the absolute numbers, Martin and his colleagues in the platform domain are interested in seeing the long-term trend in key productivity metrics.
Recently, Pleo started using Swarmia’s integration with Okta Single Sign-On, allowing people from outside the engineering organization to also access the insights in Swarmia.
This added visibility has already positively impacted the dynamic between teams and their domain leads. The domain leads can now independently look at the data in Swarmia and bring relevant questions to engineering managers.
Looking forward, Martin is particularly excited about two product areas on Swarmia’s roadmap: the data cloud and developer surveys. The data cloud will give Pleo’s executive leadership access to relevant product development metrics in dashboards external to Swarmia, making it easier to communicate the business impact of engineering.
Swarmia’s developer surveys, on the other hand, will make it possible to automatically correlate developer sentiment with the more quantitative metrics in Swarmia. While Pleo has a long history of running engineering surveys with a separate tool, they’re looking forward to the ability to combine the two data sources to get a more holistic view of the double-sided coin that is developer experience and productivity.
Overall, Martin and the Pleo engineering organization have been happy with Swarmia and the responsiveness of both the customer success and the product teams. For them, Swarmia acts as a conversation starter that sparks valuable discussions in the organization.
