Alex Plugaru is the co-founder and CTO of Gorgias, a customer service platform specialized in serving ecommerce companies. Alex leads Gorgias’ 100-person product & engineering organization whose main goal is to meet and exceed the expectations of their fast-growing customer base by continuously delivering exceptionally good software.

While Gorgias’ engineering organization has been using Swarmia since 2021, Alex recognizes that in many ways, their need for a software engineering intelligence platform like Swarmia has only increased over time.

What changed since 2021 is that the bar got a lot higher. A lot of companies are trying to make their operations more efficient, consolidating software, and trying to find the solution that is the most effective in increasing the productivity of their team.

Alex Plugaru
Co-Founder & CTO

For Gorgias, the changing market conditions have led to two things: 1) forcing the engineering leadership to improve the way they sequence and track strategically important work, and 2) moving upmarket to correspond to changes in demand.

With increasing pressure from the market, Alex considers it more important than ever to foster a culture of transparency and ownership. His goal is to give every team, manager, and director access to data that helps them make better decisions locally as well as tools that help them systematically eliminate the bottlenecks that slow them down.

Serving the whole engineering organization with relevant insights and powerful tools

When Alex first found out about Swarmia in 2021, he was skeptical whether it was the right time for the engineering organization to start looking into developer productivity metrics. However, he quickly understood that the real benefit in a tool like Swarmia aren’t the metrics, but the conversations teams start having both amongst themselves and with the wider organization as a result of the new kind of visibility.

At Gorgias, software engineers and their managers use Swarmia every day, while engineering directors, VPs, and the CTO, Alex, look at the data on a weekly and monthly cadence.

Speeding up pull request flow in teams

Before adopting Swarmia, Gorgias’ software engineering teams had already started having discussions about stale pull requests and the difficulty of getting their code reviewed as quickly as they would have wanted. By looking into the flow insights in Swarmia, the teams found three key insights about code reviews:

1. In all teams, there were outlier pull requests that were not touched for multiple days or even weeks while open.

2. Some of the teams also noticed that their relatively long review times were mostly caused by cross-team reviews taking significantly longer than internal team reviews.

3. The teams also noticed that they lacked common guidelines for code review best practices.

Gorgias’ engineers also immediately found Swarmia’s two-way integration between GitHub and Slack useful. After setting relevant working agreements in Swarmia to limit work in progress and set acceptable targets for code review time, the teams were able to get a daily digest to their team’s Slack channel to help them stay on top of ongoing work.

Many of the developers also adopted personal Slack notifications to help them stay on top of any ongoing discussions in the comments of their pull requests. Instead of having to jump between browser windows, they can quickly read, react to, and reply to GitHub comments without leaving Slack.

Using DORA metrics to communicate with non-engineering leadership

Over time, DORA metrics have become an important tool for the Gorgias engineering organization. Alex uses them to inform the reliability roadmaps he’s building and ultimately, to measure the impact of organization-wide productivity initiatives.

Alex has also found DORA metrics helpful in communicating about the health and speed of the engineering organization to his non-technical counterparts.

Complementing metrics with developer experience surveys

In addition to more traditional engineering metrics, Gorgias has also recently started experimenting with running developer experience surveys in Swarmia. By combining the two types of insights, they get a holistic understanding of developer productivity and developer experience.

In fact, Alex says that if he was introduced to Swarmia today, he’d probably start by running a survey. The results are easy to understand, and unlike system metrics, the qualitative survey answers often contain practical ideas on how to improve the systems and processes that are getting in the way of great developer experience.

Creating software capitalization reports in minutes

Recently, Alex and his team have also spent a lot of time on creating software capitalization reports. Before Swarmia, this was a manual process that involved extracting issues from Linear, Gorgias’ issue tracker, to spreadsheets and making an estimate of how much engineering effort each Linear issue required.

In addition to being slow and painful to create, the manual reports were also difficult to consume as they consisted of hundreds of projects.

Better visibility, faster cycle times, and saving hundreds of hours in software capitalization reporting

After just two months of using Swarmia, Gorgias already started seeing promising results in the teams’ average pull request cycle times.

In addition to saving hundreds of hours of work with Swarmia’s software capitalization feature, Alex is also impressed with the high Swarmia adoption rate among the Gorgias engineers.

The individual contributors aren’t, however, the only active users of Swarmia at Gorgias. Today, Alex considers the platform as an integral part of the way the whole engineering organization operates and collaborates with the rest of the business.