When you hear a company announce its unicorn status (a $1B valuation), you usually see pictures of the happy founders along with some great quotes about what inspired them to create their startup.
What you definitely don’t see is the jaw-dropping level of scaling required to ensure that the process & products behind that $1B valuation continue momentum toward $10B, $100B, and beyond.
This is especially the case when you’re Drata – the startup that hit one of the fastest $1B valuations of any company on the planet.
Drata’s cofounder & CTO Daniel Marashlian recently revealed just how important LinearB is to not only creating and maintaining a dev workflow that keeps clients happy but also in instilling a culture of empowered, happy, and fulfilled programmers.
LinearB delivers ROI minutes after adoption
When time and productivity are at a premium, the last thing a fast-growing company wants is a tool that takes a lot of time to set up, integrate into existing systems and learn to use.
The first thing Drata found useful about LinearB was that it was useful right away. Best of all, integration was easy.
“Without being an analytics expert, you simply plug LinearB into tools like GitHub and Jira, and within a matter of minutes, you get to unlock [your metrics]” says Daniel Marashlian on what it was like for Drata to adopt LinearB.
This time to ROI was not lost on one of the fastest startups to become a unicorn, “Right away, you get insights into your engineering process and therefore you get to take action on that data.”
Get insights that are easy to understand and use
A few years ago, the problem for most companies was simply getting access to their data. The problem successful companies have now is making sense of the almost limitless amount of data they can tap into.
The deluge of data can come in many forms – exported reports, spreadsheets, etc. – but only with something like LinearB could Drata make sense of what was happening in their engineering organization. And with that understanding, Drata has the information to continuously improve.
“LinearB’s dashboard is more insightful and more used than a spreadsheet about my team and org. It’s great” raves Daniel. “It’s not just me looking at some spreadsheet anymore. We can invite the tech leads to view the status of their progress, from the perspective of an individual, a team or a specific project.”
Identify and eliminate bottlenecks in real-time
Across the board, LinearB’s customers say that one of the most powerful things about seeing the metrics of things like cycle time is being able to finally identify and eliminate bottlenecks.
Drata is no different.
Daniel explains the process before LinearB, “We used postmortems of a project coming to completion and then said ‘What happened here?’ Let’s correct that moving forward or keep an eye out for early warning signs.”
Since implementing LinearB, Dan and Drata have been able to find and fix bottlenecks during the production process. “Engineering managers can use LinearB to course correct as we’re going to continue the extreme pace of velocity that we’re on.”
The WorkerB developer tool lets devs pick up and execute tasks easier
There’s no point in knowing your team’s metrics unless there’s an actual way to make decisions that improve them.
That’s where LinearB’s developer tool WorkerB has been key in helping.
A one-click plug-in that lets developers add crucial information to pull requests (estimated time to review, crucial files, etc.) in order to get them picked up faster, WorkerB also optimizes and automates a series of developer tasks. This is all done with one key goal: Let developers focus on their craft of coding while minimizing things like toil, rework and bottlenecks.
“The WorkerB app! I think that was definitely the icing on the cake for me” explains Daniel. “I was like, OK, this is awesome! If I’m a dev and I have some free time, what should I work on? WorkerB says go work on this.”
As a developer himself, Daniel loves that WorkerB is built to help from the perspective and concerns of engineers and not higher-ups.
“WorkerB’s Slack integration isn’t designed for the program managers, it’s really down to the engineers.”
Make project planning predictable
When it comes to showing the engineering department’s effect on the business bottom line, there is no more powerful metric than planning accuracy.
If projects get delivered on time, as promised, businesses see sales closed, repeat customers and upgraded requests.
At Drata, whose core values include customer-centricity, this means planning accuracy and predictability are paramount.
LinearB is key to keeping that predictability and planning accuracy.
“With LinearB, engineering’s planning effort is smoothed out” explains Dan. “That helps everyone not scramble at the end of the month or not feel like they have to work 15 hours a day to get caught up on a Friday.”
Not only does this predictability help close deals, it also helps keep developers happy.
“People aren’t getting burnt out when things are predictable. Therefore I think they can make better engineering decisions.”
Unlock your company’s inner unicorn…
The good news for every engineering org is that Drata’s experience isn’t the exception, it’s the rule. Over 80% of LinearB customers see improved performance in under 120 days of implementation. So no matter what side of the unicorn wall you’re on, LinearB is there to help you build the engineering department you want and your business needs.
