Intsights Case Study

Engineering leaders who utilize data to improve their teams have learned that the manual processes used for pulling data get deprioritized when scaling. Instead, organizations using automation to streamline engineering data make it easy for leaders to provide confident answers to executives and data-driven decisions for their teams.

Eighteen months ago Intsights VP of R&D, Amir Hozez, knew if he wanted a data-driven engineering organization, he would need to streamline engineering team data directly to the team leaders themselves. He needed a platform that would automatically process his engineering data and make it accessible without manual processes. He needed Development Pipeline Orchestration with LinearB.

“The manual work that went into collecting our engineering data created a barrier between our managers and their data.”

Unshipped code has no value to customers. So when Amir heard feedback from the developers about having to wait days to get a Pull Request picked up for review, he knew there was a problem. But without team metrics like Cycle Time or Deployment Frequency to backup the feedback, he had trouble effectively communicating the issue to the team leaders. The problem persisted.

Within days of adopting LinearB, Amir was able to see his engineering team metrics for the first time. He knew the PR Pickup Time was going to be high, but he was taken aback when a staggering 6 Days showed up. It was time to take action.

“It was all very democratic. The LinearB team walked us through the product and answered our questions. Then we went off for a couple days to discuss if this was right for us. Our teams are focused on continuously improving, which to us means transparency. Everyone understood this was a tool that would generate healthy working practices.”

LinearB is the only tool that integrates a team’s project management system and their Git repositories to provide a unique view into how teams work. Unbabel quickly connected LinearB to their Jira instance and GitLab repositories.

“With Jira & GitLab, it has always been difficult to get the big picture. I know the Atlassian guys have been putting in lots of reporting, trying to give you a picture of how a program of work is done. But it has always been very difficult to get an understanding of where bits of work are stuck, where teams aren't working in an effective, efficient manner. LinearB makes visible, what isn’t with any other tool.”

The case study above is a clear example of the tactical power LinearB’s Software Delivery Intelligence platform provides. But the true secret of its success comes from the confidence it provides to leadership.

Gut feeling and qualitative feedback can only take an organization so far. As companies begin the scaling process, real maturity begins with data. By taking a data-driven approach to decision making, engineering managers become more confident in their decisions, individual

contributors are able to focus their efforts on solving the right problems, and engineering leaders like Amir at Intsights are able to communicate with confidence at the executive table.

“Streamlining our data with LinearB and taking a data-driven approach has been a natural step in our scale-up journey. Both to scale our organization as well as to scale ourselves as engineering managers.”