Using DX as an Engineering Manager at GlobalVision

Engineering leaders are always on the lookout for opportunities to create more leverage—and for a long time at GlobalVision, the highest leverage investment was in improving legacy systems. Once these systems were in a better place, leadership shifted their attention to the next high-leverage activity: reducing waste out from engineers’ day-to-day work. “Productivity wasn’t a problem,” explains Alex Vados, Engineering Manager at GlobalVision. “It was more of a question of, okay, we have the team we want. We’re in a good place with our software. How do we push this to the next level?”

Vados’s team recognized there could be many different strategies for approaching this problem, but they were most interested in finding a solution that would empower developers. “We were looking for a solution to give developers a little more power with data and feedback opportunities,” says Vados. “We didn’t have anything to collect feedback about developers’ workflows. Like, ‘what’s really holding you up?’ or ‘How do you like the technicalities of your job?’”

The team evaluated two other vendors and DX as potential solutions. Vados says one of these vendors appeared to be designed for people in his role—engineering managers—and the initial dashboard you see when you’re logging in is clean and easy to understand. However, the tool did not have anything for surveys at the time, and the items on their roadmap related to surveys seemed reactive. Further, DX’s Frontline product was released during GlobalVision’s evaluation process, which meant Frontline could subsume this solution’s core metrics.

As for the other vendor, had GlobalVision had bigger needs for R&D cost capitalization reporting, Vados says they might have evaluated this solution more seriously. However, GlobalVision’s main goal was to find a tool that would empower development teams, and this product was not designed for this specific need.

GlobalVision ultimately chose DX because of the qualitative insights they could get as well as how the product ties in system-based metrics. “The main thing for us was surveys and getting useful insights from the surveys,” Vados adds. "It’s also helpful that whenever we need a metric that isn’t already in Data Cloud, it’s easy to create the metric with DX’s Studio.”

Because their goal was to empower developers, it was also important that the product was well-received. On that, Vados says engagement from developers in DX is “super high.” In the first DX snapshot, 100% of engineers responded and logged in to review the results themselves. Additionally, the Frontline product is being used regularly. “For me as a manager, Frontline is a dashboard I can glance at to see what work is being done, what’s blocked, and what’s not happening,” says Vados. “I like to use it every day and I know the devs are using it every day.”

Further, combining self-reported and system-based metrics has contributed to developers being more receptive and engaged with the quantitative data from Frontline. “I think going that route allows us to use metrics like those in Frontline, where they’re getting pinged about PRs, but they’re engaged with it because they know it’s tied to something. For example, we can say, ‘We’re doing this because you said reviews are taking too long.’ The engagement is really good because DX takes a developer-first approach.”