Arrive selects DX after head-to-head evaluation of leading vendors

After an acquisition doubled Arrive’s size, the Developer Productivity team realized its old methods for understanding developer friction no longer scaled. Historically, the team had relied on interviews, office visits, and homegrown surveys to learn what was slowing engineers down. “We had always been very customer-first, running our own surveys and interviews to understand developer sentiment and friction,” says Kristjan Ulst, Engineering Manager for Developer Productivity at Arrive. “But after the acquisition, it became clear that we couldn’t use that manual approach anymore. We needed help.”

At the same time, leaders asked for DORA metrics to get a baseline view of performance. “Some teams had DORA already, others didn’t, and the data wasn’t centralized,” explains Priit Pihus, another leader on the Developer Productivity team. “Stakeholders wanted a consistent way to see how teams were working and learn from the ones performing well.”

Arrive began its search for external developer productivity metrics solutions with a clear set of criteria—chief among them, finding a platform that could capture qualitative insights directly from developers. “To truly see what’s going on, you have to ask developers where the pain is,” explains Ulst.

The team evaluated several options and conducted proof-of-concepts with DX and two other vendors. The other vendors had strengths, but also clear limitations. “One of DX’s competitors seemed to have quite a powerful product, but the learning curve to actually configure and use it was much higher than it seemed with DX. Our philosophy is that if it’s powerful but too complicated to use for most people, then it’s a waste,” says Pihus. “We also noticed that their product relied too heavily on system data, and that our Jira hygiene would need to be pixel-perfect to get the value they were pitching.”

For the third vendor, Arrive’s DevProd team felt the platform was missing key elements that mattered to them. “They had some interesting automation features, but we’d already built a similar internal tool,” says Ulst. “Their surveys were just a shell and hadn’t been invested in. The system data was there, but by then, we’d already found what we wanted in DX.”

Two primary factors led Arrive to choose DX. The first was its research-backed survey capability, integrated with quantitative data. “We’d been doing sentiment work manually, and DX made it systematic and credible,” says Ulst. The second was usability. “We needed engineering managers to open it and understand it right away,” adds Pihus. “For DevEx leaders like us, we can spend all day exploring every dashboard and metric. But for engineering managers, the platform needs to be quick and intuitive so they can open it and get the insights they need immediately. DX had that.”

A final bonus tipped the scales: DX’s Software Catalog. Arrive was already running Backstage and planning to expand its catalog efforts, so DX’s built-in solution was an unexpected advantage. “DX’s catalog made several things faster to implement,” says Pihus. “We weren’t buying DX for that, but it made our choice even easier.”

After selecting their preferred vendor, Arrive’s DevProd team needed to secure internal approval. Fortunately, because they involved leadership early in the proof-of-concept process, they had already built strong buy-in. “I gave a lot of presentations about what we were seeing from the initial data and got feedback from leaders on how they felt about it,” Pihus says. “One in particular was for a larger group, including our SVP of Engineering, heads of engineering, and managers, after the POC with DX. I had managers coming to me after asking, ‘When can we get access to this?’. That session really gave leadership a clear sense of our team’s enthusiasm for DX.” When it came to procurement, the DevProd team shared an estimate of the time DX would save their team compared to building in-house to help justify the platform’s cost.

Looking ahead, Arrive’s plan is to establish a continuous improvement loop: qualitative and quantitative data inform quarterly planning; managers track progress during the quarter; ongoing measurement validates what moved and what still needs work.

They’re also expanding their use of DX in three ways:

• Tracking AI impact, with a particular focus on measuring whether AI usage affects delivery and incident rates.
• Driving self-service ownership, with the help of DX’s scorecards and catalog. “Success is when teams can kick off initiatives, update scorecards, and drive migrations themselves all on their own,” says Ulst. “All the components are there. I can’t wait for teams to send data to DX and to their own scorecards and initiatives without actually needing us. It’s going to be a true platform product.”
• Making DX a shared lens for leadership one-on-ones: providing a clear, common view of team health and friction that helps managers and heads of engineering align quickly.

For a DevProd team of six supporting a large engineering organization, the ultimate outcome is leverage. As Ulst puts it: “DX gives us a way to listen at scale and act with precision. That’s how we keep improving as the company grows.”