ShareFile shaves cycle time by 32% and improves PR response time by 25% with Allstacks

While trying to improve customer experience in a fast-moving, competitive market, ShareFile’s engineering leaders faced an all-too-familiar problem: there was no easy way to actually see what teams were doing, where they were struggling, and even what they were working on or toward. That lack of visibility made it difficult to estimate when features would be finished, let alone plan for future risks or challenges. The team was spending time in status meetings that didn’t resolve anything because no one knew what the metrics actually were. ShareFile even tried building some custom solutions, but found the “garbage in, garbage out” problem was real. “To be successful, we all need to be aligned and have the right goals,” explained Michael Swanson, senior engineering manager and one of four ShareFile engineering leaders we spoke with. “We need to know what our strategy is, what the vision is, and how we’re trying to execute and deliver value quickly to the customers, but we also need to know what are we focused on now? Are we aligned architecturally, who’s working on what, and where it’s at?”

With so many engineering teams, true alignment would mean having all the metrics in a single location, and that was another challenge facing ShareFile. The team tried to broadly implement a “red/amber/green” status flag alert, but as Swanson put it, “that was really not much more than putting your finger up to see which way the wind was blowing. It’s not quantitative.” And the lack of details and scope made it easy to push problems off to be dealt with at the end of the quarter or year, or even miss them altogether.

It was time for a change. ShareFile needed a holistic tool that integrated with existing workflows like Jira but also provided a single pane of glass where everyone could see - and customize - the metrics. In the end, the company reached out to Allstacks, not because of any catastrophic event, but instead because the engineering team was really ready to tackle the problems head on. “We just didn’t have the right level of infrastructure to hold our team accountable,” David LeStrat, Chief Product and Technology Officer at ShareFile, said.

When the time was right, ShareFile partnered with Allstacks and made a conscious decision to start slowly. Working with just a handful of teams, ShareFile identified four key metrics (for starters) and built a dashboard around them. The metrics were carefully chosen and were meant to be useful for all engineering teams, no matter which part of the organization they sat in. The core metrics were investment type, sprint predictability, coding days and backlog health. Investment type looks at the proportion of maintenance or “keeping the lights on” work vs value-add work. Sprint predictability was another way to look at velocity, because it’s possible to slice and dice velocity into different pieces in the Allstacks tool. The number of days coding might be a bit controversial, but ShareFile aims to see teams coding 3 days a week. (For comparison, teams code on average about 2.75 days a week, according to our Engineering Performance Benchmarks.) “If something’s wrong (with this metric), it’s a way to ask a question,” Swanson said. “We’re not assuming someone’s not working. Maybe the story is just too big or there are too many dependencies.” And finally backlog health is just a way to help teams know when they have the right amount of work in the pipeline, not too much or too little.

At ShareFile, Allstacks was both a catalyst for culture change and something that required a culture change in order to get the most out of it. Allstacks brought the transparency, and with that came a “democratization” of data, and that powered a tremendous amount of change. But it also required lots of conversations and the creation of a culture that was open to change. In the end, “we’re much more accountable around delivering what we said we’d do,” Marushevskyi said.

Through it all the ShareFile team “fully partnered” with Allstacks at every step of the process, trained a trainer, rolled it out slowly, and created documentation and support around all the new processes. “We kind of went in full circle,” Swanson said. Over time the rest of the team adopted Allstacks, and now groups beyond engineering are giving it a go, based on the success they’ve seen within the development teams.

At ShareFile, Allstacks was both a catalyst for culture change and something that required a culture change in order to get the most out of it. Allstacks brought the transparency, and with that came a “democratization” of data, and that powered a tremendous amount of change. But it also required lots of conversations and the creation of a culture that was open to change. In the end, “we’re much more accountable around delivering what we said we’d do,” Marushevskyi said. Through it all the ShareFile team “fully partnered” with Allstacks at every step of the process, trained a trainer, rolled it out slowly, and created documentation and support around all the new processes. “We kind of went in full circle,” Swanson said. Over time the rest of the team adopted Allstacks, and now groups beyond engineering are giving it a go, based on the success they’ve seen within the development teams.