Engineering Management Platforms: 5 Real-Life Success Stories

“Data! Data! Data! I can’t make bricks without clay.”

Sherlock Holmes, in the famous story of The Adventure of the Copper Beeches quotes the dialogue when he feels frustrated because of lack of details, data, and zero connection between different dots of his puzzle.

Even after 120 years, this statement holds true for every assertive business leader. They understand the profound impact of data, analytics, and engineering management in running, thriving, and growing their teams, products, and customer experience.

Engineering management platforms are a new-age way to convert the “clay” of raw data into “bricks” of actionable insights, thus building stronger teams, with enhanced productivity, a positive DevEx, and smooth software development.

A World Without an Engineering Management Platform

Using an engineering management platform can open a development team to a whole new world of possibilities, right from operational management, to streamlining SDLC, and achieving business breakthroughs that were once unimaginable. An EMP makes the lives of every stakeholder easier by bringing in data in decision-making conversations, using actionable insights to deliver faster results with limited headcount, and focusing on developer well-being, and productivity.

Our latest post on why teams should use an engineering management platform already talks about the possibilities an EMP opens up to teams plagued with burnout, high workload, uneven engineering demands, and redundant processes.

But for a moment, let’s imagine a world without an engineering management platform and its impact on engineering productivity, and overall development teams.

Without actionable data in place, most engineering conversations will be driven by guesswork and intuition, rather than concrete evidence. Think about EMs speaking to their devs, “I can see your project is not moving, are we working enough on it” This is what happens when managers lack visibility into their developer’s workflow. With insights milked by an EMP, the conversation suddenly shifts to, ‘I can see that last week 8 out of 10 PRs have not been merged yet and we are spending more time fixing bugs rather than any new story point. Do you know where the issue is?’

Moreover, EMPs help teams to identify trends and patterns that contribute to our successes or failures of an SDLC. Without engineering analytics, it will become a nuisance for teams to identify bottlenecks, break the cycle of continuous improvements, and optimal processes. All this can take a toll on a team's health, even causing burnout, and chronic stress of always keeping the lights on.

When teams lack a democratized access into their processes, they cannot take required steps to improve operational efficiencies, and people health; even bringing down the culture of accountability, and transparency. Because they do not know where to start!

Furthermore, without a robust engineering management platform, a team’s ability to identify and mitigate risks is impacted heavily. In the engineering ecosystem, where safety and reliability are paramount, the ability to proactively identify and address potential issues is critical. An EMP works round the clock, monitoring and analyzing data in real-time to detect anomalies, prevent failures, and ensure system robustness.

Now that we know why the engineering ecosystem needs EMPs; let’s see the real-time impact it brings to engineering teams.

5 Real Life Examples of Teams Using Engineering Management Platform

Below, 5 teams share their impactful, and transformative stories of using engineering management platforms to drive productivity.

1. Amenify Drives Productivity Through a 55% Increase in Maker Time

Amenify had fundamental operational challenges when they started using Hatica, an engineering management platform. Without end to end visibility into their developer workflow, it was difficult for the Amenify’s engineering team to manage their distributed team, and keep developers productive and happy. Moreover, the team productivity was further impacted because of broken communication, and limited success with async mode of communication.

After deploying Hatica, Amenify realized that the best, and foremost way to improve their developer’s productivity was to gain a holistic understanding of the entire development pipeline, and all stakeholders involved. With an engineering management platform in place, Amenify strategically aligned their engineering efforts, had data-driven conversations with devs around what blockers faced, and optimized their processes.

And guess what with Hatica Check-ins, their asynchronous standups were more efficient and useful. The team started cleaning up their process residue, used data-driven async standups for status updates, and 1:1s, decluttered office time by combining meetings hours in the second half of day, setup, and followed PR practices for code hygiene.

Moreover, the team tracked outside work hours for most developers, and started noticing signs of stress, and burnout in early stages. They further worked together to streamline workload. 

Read more about Amenify’s journey with Hatica.

2. Vymo Built on Engineering Effectiveness with Data 

Vymo has made giant strides as a sales engagement platform. The journey wasn’t easy, neither was it meant to be. As their engineering demand rose, Vymo realized a room of improvement in their engineering processes.

However, the team lacked an objective way to measure and benchmark the operational success with respect to both strategic, and daily initiatives. There was no single pane view to visualize all their engineering efforts, or analyze the resource-cost ratio.

Besides, as a large engineering team, the team also faced collaboration issues as engineering demand rose. All this took a toll on the dev team, resulting in clogged workflows, and a sub-optimal velocity, and low engineering productivity.

As the next probable step, Vymo created a roadmap for engineering productivity management, and in turn, started using an EMP. With Hatica’s engineering management platform, Vymo started tracking their delivery metrics on a recurring basis, rather than in retrograde.

As soon as they realize any operational bottleneck with the help of process metrics, the EMs and senior leads now have the power to course correct in real-time, while making the engineering cycle smoother, and more predictable. With consistent, and factual improvement in engineering processes, the developer workflows got streamlined automatically, with optimized workload, and plugged communication loops between teams.

3. Bobble.ai’s Growing Engineering Team Reduced Communication Barriers, and Improved Project Velocity by 2.2x

Bobble.ai wasn’t just the first Conversation Media Platform, but one of the first few in the communication segment to realize their own piling communication debt within the engineering team. In the pursuit of delivering at scale, and fast, it became difficult for Bobble.ai to create business alignment with teams, leading to team friction, high communication debt, and devs with low morale, and productivity.

As they started scaling up, Bobble.ai realized the need to have a platform with end to end visibility into engineering performance, and if the team is aligned to company goals. That’s where an engineering management platform came into the picture.

In their journey of using an EMP for boosting productivity, Bobble.ai realized the disproportionate work allocation between devs, unspent and underutilized resources, and poor effort alignment between teams. The team used Hatica’s engineering management platform to map software resources, with performance, and bring operational, and people efficiencies. It not only empowered the team to resolve their communication gaps, reduce flow of unplanned, and adhoc work from the product side of things, but kept striving towards greater productivity, and excellence.

4. Towards Leaner, and Productive Teams: Dive

Dive had a difficult, but an empowering goal of making meetings more productive. Although their foundations stood on the goals of building super productive teams, Dive had a long way to go in actually realizing it. The workflows were broken; they saw high cycle time, and even higher failed deployments. These issues further snowballed into frequent overwork, and low developer productivity.

Dive wanted to correlate data, and strict a complete story about what’s happening in their engineering team. Ans using an engineering management platform was their best shot to maximize productivity, and understand the engineering journey.

As Dive got complete visibility into all moving parts of the software lifecycle, the team understood where, and why their cycle times were high, and what each developer was working on without disturbing their flow state. As all the ‘whys’ got answered, developers moved smoothly towards more fruitful conversations– why reviews are taking too long, or now that we reduced our deployment times drastically, how can we increase delivery velocity?

Dive’s engineering team is pretty self-organized now, and scaling without getting bogged down by emergencies, or failed deployments.

5. Encamp Ramping Up Developer Velocity With Data-Backed Insights  

Encamp was built on the idea of saving hours of organizations by automating environment compliance, while giving back to the ecosystem. As Encamp scaled, and started catering to 200+ clients with a 500% revenue growth, they saw the need to streamline their productivity ambitions. However, here– it got complicated.

Without enough data into how the engineering processes are moving, it became an uphill battle for Encamp to optimize their delivery cadence, and see if the developmental machinery is actually moving, and improving. The team was not only struggling to keep track of process metrics but also battling a growing sense of doubt about whether they were truly heading in the right direction. It felt like their compass was lost, leaving devs adrift in a sea of uncertainty, and unpredictable engineering. As these issues kept rippling, the overall engineering productivity suffered, putting a halt to their happy working days.

However, with data analytics in the place, the gloomy state became rosier, and merrier. The bigger picture became more clear, and the data-driven insights focused devs to work on the right things- a balance of coding, grooming, maintaining infrastructure, and reviewing. As the team started having more visibility into workload, the work became more predictable, workflows streamlined– all building a psychologically and cognitively safer environment for devs to work in.

Now the team knows why it took an extra day to debug a code, where most devs are spending their time, why the current sprint didn’t deliver much result, or how can the planning accuracy be improved.

Global Engineering Teams Creating Momentum With Engineering Management Platforms

In today's fast-paced world of software development, businesses face relentless pressure to make swift decisions. The stakes are high, and every choice matters. The speed of development holds a key competitive advantage. An engineering management platform not only enables businesses to make quicker, but also deeply informed decisions. That’s how teams can navigate the turbulent waters of software development with data-backed confidence and clarity.

These five teams are only but a reflection  of a new paradigm where engineering effectiveness is an ongoing part of our existence, and not a distant north-star metric anymore. Here is a short summary of how EMPs have impacted businesses, and helped them realize their potential:

• On an average, engineering teams have reduced their budget overruns by 28x after using an engineering management platform

• Understand underlying patterns and teammates better

• Upto 30% improvement in planning accuracy

• Reduce unplanned work by 25%

• Reduced developer’s idle time: More hours available for deep work, sometimes even upto 10+ hours

• Cycle time reduced by 28%

• Reduced sprint overflow

As workflows get streamlined, teams have more space and time in their hands to grow, become productive, and keep innovating– All with the help of engineering management platforms. Businesses that can harness the power of data using EMPs are well-positioned to gain a competitive advantage and drive significant growth.

Bottom Line: Use an Engineering Management Platform Today!

An engineering management platform expands our ability to identify and mitigate risks associated with SDLC, while driving cost savings, and next-level productivity. Embracing data analytics within engineering teams is no longer a luxury; it is an absolute necessity.

Understanding your engineering team in real-time is the best way for businesses to “be there,” making connections with their devs, and creating micro-moments of engineering success everyday for the whole team.

Today, over 20,000+ engineers check into Hatica’s engineering management platform to track process success, and project deliverables; at the same time, ensuring their own work-life balance, productivity, and build on developer experience. It’s now time to use the EMP technology to its full potential. Request a demo to see how an engineering management platform can empower your engineering team.