Optimizing the way engineering operates at ComboCurve

When CJ Montano joined ComboCurve as CTO, the organization had already been scaling at a fast pace. However, culturally, developers felt pressure to focus on shipping new features. Quality was suffering as a result, as was the speed of development and the codebase experience.

“It became increasingly obvious to me that there were anti-patterns with the way productivity was being measured,” Montano recalls. “We had Jellyfish here at the time. Jellyfish has a top-down approach to measurement, largely benefiting leaders and not those doing the actual work. This approach contributed to a culture of mandate and prescription, and the developers were feeling like ‘our job here is just to build things and get them out.’”

Montano notes that Jellyfish is great at visualizing DORA metrics in an intuitive way. “It does DORA metrics well, but that’s only part of the story,” Montano says. ComboCurve ultimately switched to DX for two reasons: the company was more aligned with DX’s approach, and also because DX could bring in the quantitative insights they were getting from Jellyfish and pair them with new qualitative insights. “When we had to weigh the two choices, it became apparent that the harder - and more important problem to solve - was capturing developer sentiment, which is DX’s sweet spot. Given that DX could also provide the top-down metrics, the decision was easy.”

Today, ComboCurve uses DX to give developers a way to voice the issues they’re experiencing in their work and a path to getting those problems solved. “I believe that by giving our developers a voice, and giving them space to fix their own issues, that fundamentally the organization will benefit in terms of increased speed and value,” Montano adds.

Furthermore, the metrics from DX also help Montano tell a story at the board level about how his organization is operating. “Investors care about building the right product. However, it’s not always as obvious the importance of building the product right. To accomplish this, it is imperative to constantly improve the development operation, get it of high quality, so that the end product will automatically improve,” says Montano, explaining that the health of his operation is a topic he discusses in every board meeting. “I need to be able to say, ‘Look, we released more frequently.’ Or ‘Our builds aren’t failing as much anymore’ and ‘Development operations are getting healthier.’ DX gives me the ability to tell that story over time.”