Dan Gaskin is an engineering manager at SKUTOPIA, where he leads a remote-first squad that consists of three engineering teams. One of the main pain points Dan was looking to solve was the limited visibility into the bottlenecks that were slowing down the distributed engineering teams.
Around the same time, SKUTOPIA was planning to rapidly grow its engineering headcount and enter international markets with their ecommerce order fulfillment solution.
Engineering Manager
With fast growth and geographically distributed teams, it was important for the engineering managers at SKUTOPIA that the solution they’d choose would help them scale the company’s open feedback culture and help them quickly take action on the issues and ideas software engineers brought up.
Engineering Manager
Overall, the growing organization was in need of a tool that would allow them to measure the right things, complement those healthy measures with sentiment data from engineers, and allow them to create a great place for engineers to work.
Engineering Manager
Combining survey data with engineering metrics and developer tooling
When Dan and his team started looking into solutions that would help them improve developer experience and productivity, it was important that the product they’d choose would allow them to combine developer feedback with engineering metrics, such as DORA.
Engineering Manager
In addition to the system metrics and developer feedback through surveys, the engineering teams at SKUTOPIA have been particularly excited about the feedback loops they’re able to automate with the help of Swarmia’s Working Agreements and Slack notifications.
For example, one of the teams Dan leads used to be in the habit of having a dozen pull requests open at any given time. Together, the team agreed to limit the number to 6 PRs, allowing them to focus on completing work, rather than having lots of work happening in parallel.
Engineering Manager
Perhaps the most loved Swarmia feature among the SKUTOPIA engineers has been the Slack integration, which not only sends developers timely notifications about code reviews, failed CI checks, and GitHub comments but also allows them to react and reply to GitHub comments without leaving Slack.
Engineering Manager
Improved developer experience and streamlined productivity
Dan and the whole SKUTOPIA engineering organization have been happy with the end-to-end visibility Swarmia provides. In a short time, they’ve noticed a positive impact on their code review times, which has allowed them to dramatically reduce their cycle times.
Engineering Manager
Developer surveys, on the other hand, have allowed the managers to scale the culture of openness and honest feedback — but with the added psychological safety of anonymous answers. This way, the engineers can more freely express their frustrations, concerns, and improvement ideas.
Engineering Manager
Overall, Swarmia has given the SKUTOPIA engineering organization exactly what they were looking for: a continuous improvement platform that scales as the organization grows and matures.
Engineering Manager