Alex Circei, CEO of Waydev, sat down with Auth0 (Okta) to talk about visibility, AI adoption, and the future of engineering analytics.
Every department in a modern company has analytics. Sales teams live in Salesforce. Marketing tracks every campaign click in HubSpot. Finance runs forecasting models that can predict revenue six quarters out. But engineering, the team building the product itself, has often had almost no real visibility beyond a Jira backlog.
That gap is something Alex Circei, CEO and co-founder of Waydev, had been thinking about for over a decade. Last week, Alex sat down with Shreya Gupta at Demo Auth0 (Okta) to talk about the story behind Waydev, how engineering teams can finally start measuring what matters, and where the industry is heading in the AI era.
“We didn’t have a way to measure and to see the analytics behind software development like Salesforce or other tools for other markets. It was impossible to check exactly how the things were happening except the Jira dashboards. You didn’t have something to zoom in: in the code, in the PRs, in all these things.”
– Alex Circei
That observation became the founding insight behind Waydev, an engineering intelligence platform that connects directly to your toolchain and surfaces the signals hidden inside your code activity. Eight years later, we serve enterprise customers and continue to expand what it means to truly understand how software gets built.
Most engineering tools ask you to adapt to them. Waydev works the other way around.
From the very first call, our team works to understand exactly how a customer does software development: their workflows, their tools, their team structure, and then configures the platform around that. Nothing in your existing process needs to change.
“Each team is different, each group of teams is different, and we have the capabilities to adapt and to offer a really tailored platform for their needs.”
– Alex Circei
This is what sets Waydev apart in this market. It’s not just a dashboard you plug in, it’s a platform that molds itself to the way your engineering org actually operates, and grows with it over time.
Productivity is not a single metric. Alex breaks it down clearly:
“You can look at engineering productivity from multiple ways: you want to speed up the process, to have better planning, to improve quality, also to do a lot of automation these days with LLMs. For us it all mainly depends on the goal of the company.”
Different companies optimize for different goals. Some are racing to ship. Others are prioritizing predictability and quality. The goal of Waydev is to help teams measure the right signals based on their specific priorities, not to impose a one-size-fits-all definition of success.
One of the most pressing questions engineering leaders face today is whether their AI tools are delivering real value. Copilot, Cursor, Claude, ChatGPT — teams are using all of them, often without knowing which ones are having any impact.
“Now you are using a multitude of tools and you don’t know which is the most adopted in the company. We are adding all of these tools into our platform. We have all the historical data from the last 3 years and we can tell you, since you added AI, how things changed.”
– Alex Circei
Because Waydev already has years of historical engineering data, we are uniquely positioned to answer these questions. The platform can compare performance before and after AI adoption, identify which teams are leveraging AI effectively, and surface which tools are generating real, production-grade output. We can analyze more than 150 engineering metrics and even predict future improvements based on historical patterns.
For example: if a team’s cycle time is currently five days, the system can simulate what process changes would reduce that to three days, and provide concrete, actionable recommendations.
Software development is entering a new phase, and Alex has a clear vision for where Waydev fits in it: to become a system of record for how software is built in this new world, measuring both human engineers and AI agents, understanding how they interact, and helping teams build faster with higher quality.
“We are looking to measure the agents, the productivity of the agents, how they’re interacting with humans, and how things are built in the future. Also to help engineering leaders manage more teams because now everything will be more automated.”
As autonomous agents take on more of the development lifecycle, the ability to see how humans and agents collaborate, and where the bottlenecks are, will become just as critical as measuring human engineers alone.
Alex closed the conversation with advice he gives consistently to other founders, rooted in his experience as a YC alumnus:
“They should look at a faster time to market. If they have an idea, use everything out there: Auth0, any LLM, any company, to go directly to the customer to validate their vision. As soon as they have the first customers, they should accelerate and double down. Don’t care too much about the quality of the code in the first couple of months. Look at the velocity, go to the customer, and deliver value.”
And the principle that ties it all together, borrowed from YC itself: Make something people love.
If you’re still guessing whether your AI tools are working, it’s time to stop guessing.
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