How SKUTOPIA combines survey data and engineering metrics to scale developer experience

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.

We’re growing fast and anticipating ramping up the team in the near future. We’re also looking into breaking out into international markets outside of Australia, which will make the team even more distributed.

Dan Gaskin
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.

We used to get developer feedback through a team health update meeting. It was a safe environment where people felt comfortable bringing up issues. The problem was that collecting this brutally honest — and genuinely helpful — feedback through meetings got harder as we grew.

Dan Gaskin
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.

For us, the most important thing is to focus on improving what makes an engineer’s life harder or causes frustration. These are the pain points that we want to solve.

Dan Gaskin
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.

Having the metrics in Swarmia means that we can try different improvements, iterate, and see whether the change was good or bad. Surveys give us the same information, but from an emotional perspective.

Dan Gaskin
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.

Since adopting the working agreement to limit the number of open pull requests, the team hasn’t gone over the limit once. They’re now able to focus on finishing the work they’ve started, rather than trying to multitask.

Dan Gaskin
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.

We can have full conversations with replies directly with the Swarmia Slack bot rather than logging into GitHub. We get a notification if anything in our commit fails a check or if anything wonky happens in a pipeline during deploy. The days of babysitting a merge are gone.

Dan Gaskin
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.

I don’t think there is an engineer in the world that doesn’t want to get their code out faster. Without knowing where we had bottlenecks in the ticket lifecycle, we were unable to introduce effective measures.

Dan Gaskin
Engineering Manager

Developer experience 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.

The benefit of surveys is that we’re able to tap into the emotional side of engineering. We get insight into what causes an engineer frustration, happiness, or sadness. This helps us decide which improvements we should focus our energy on next.

Dan Gaskin
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.

We’re using Swarmia to improve anything and everything we can within our software development lifecycle. The end-to-end visibility means that we’re not limited in what we can improve.

Dan Gaskin
Engineering Manager