Tatiana Pipino is a Technical Program Manager at Prima. As a part of her role, she looks after the effectiveness of the whole engineering organization. Paolo D’Incau is a Senior Engineering Manager who is currently leading three of Prima’s engineering teams across one business domain.
When the Prima engineering organization first started looking into solutions for measuring engineering productivity, their goal was to improve visibility into organization-level metrics. The lack of visibility was making it difficult to recognize process bottlenecks and possible improvement areas.
Additionally, Paolo and the other engineering managers were interested in measuring DORA metrics and other healthy productivity measures, including work-in-progress.
It was important for Paolo that the tool they’d choose wouldn’t just be a dashboard for the engineering leadership. While he acknowledges that it is mainly the engineering managers’ job to collect metrics and bring discussion topics to the team, it’s up to the team to decide what — if anything — they’d like to do based on the data.
Better ways to track technical objectives and practical tools for continuous improvement
Choosing a tool for tracking DORA and other engineering metrics quickly became a critical project at Prima, as the company is known for its focus on technology and data. In addition to finding a partner that was aligned with Prima’s values, the goal was to arrive at a consistent measurement framework across teams and domains.
Tatiana, who wasn’t directly involved in the evaluation process, has since become a power user of Swarmia. She immediately saw the value in using a single platform for tracking key metrics, such as DORA, across the organization.
Paolo and the other engineering managers, on the other hand, have been using Swarmia as a tool for learning and sharing — not only within teams but also across them. They never use Swarmia to directly compare teams, but rather, to run experiments and report back on the results to the rest of the group to spark conversations and drive continuous improvement.
The engineering managers at Prima have found Swarmia’s Working Agreements and Slack notifications to be extremely valuable. The Working Agreements are particularly useful every time new teams are established in the growing engineering organization.
More than anything, Paolo appreciates the conversations that were spurred by adopting and adjusting the Working Agreements in his teams.
Huge leaps forward in productivity and cross-department collaboration
After using Swarmia for over a year, the Prima engineering organization has experienced massive productivity improvements across all engineering teams and domains.
With the baseline Tatiana now gets from Swarmia, it’s also easier for her and the teams to set more relevant engineering objectives going forward.
Paolo has been particularly impressed with the ease of analyzing and actioning data from Swarmia. Instead of chasing after individual metrics, he uses Swarmia daily to look at longer-term trends and find discussion starters that have the potential to drive the whole organization forward.
Overall, both Tatiana and Paolo feel like Swarmia has provided them with the visibility and insights the whole engineering organization needs to continue to do their best work. As the business and its engineering organization keep growing, the data-driven culture they’ve built over the past year will allow them to scale more effectively.
