Appjobs Case Study

Sure, so first of all, thank you for having me! I am a VP of Technology at Appjobs, reporting directly to the CEO of the company. My main focus is on infrastructure and technical operations, but also tech strategy and vision and R&D.

It’s been, I think, around a year since we added Waydev to Appjobs and the impact is definitely positive. We are able to improve some areas of the way we work, the reception was positive and currently, people take it for granted that there is Waydev and that we are using this tool.

This is a great question and hard to answer at the same time. So, if I could answer an opposite question, perhaps: “How would it be without Waydev?” I would say that you can compare it to a person that is losing sight. Thanks to Waydev, we have a lot of insight into the whole development process. We have a more data-driven approach currently, thanks to Waydev.

Another comparison could be driving a car. You notice that something is wrong, something is odd and the brakes aren’t working as they should. In that scenario, the brakes don’t brake immediately, right? It’s a process, they deteriorate slowly. But these changes are difficult to notice. They go on with time, and the same is with the development process. Thanks to Waydev we could see aspects of our software process that we couldn’t see before.

When we found Waydev, there was no particular problem which we wanted to solve at the time. What we wanted was a meaningful view of engineering and the engineering process. Thanks to Waydev, we were able to find a couple of obstacles that the team felt, but wasn’t really aware of.

One of those things was the way that we were running the code review process. Addressing that issue, thanks to Waydev that showed us certain metrics, we were able to understand what was the root cause of the problems with our code review, and we were able to improve our resolution time drastically.

Another thing was the ability to look into the onboarding process. Thanks to Waydev we had a much smoother onboarding process and we gained the ability to act quickly and remove obstacles during that process. That was a very important aspect to us in Appjobs since we are a remote-first organization and we were a remote-first organization even before COVID.

Right now, companies are sort of forced to do that. In our case, that was a choice. It was a path that we chose to go, and the whole aspect of engineering effectiveness was very important to us. That was something that we wanted to include in our culture and Waydev had all the aspects, all the features that were aligned with that vision.

I would say that Waydev works nicely with the OKR system. It gives teams the ability to check the progress, course correct, do certain things differently in order to achieve the objectives, and set the key results in a different way, or adjust them a little bit according to that.

It may come as a surprise that actually developers are using it more often than the managers. It was quite counter-intuitive at first, but with time we noticed that Waydev added an element of competitiveness among the development community. Developers are actually looking into the charts, and it’s almost like gamification, because everyone takes it with a grasp of salt, but they actually enjoy it.

It’s not only about lines of code and active days, especially since in a startup environment like ours the context is very important. The context of the task or the context of this sprint, where, on some occasions, you have a lot of research to do before you can even go into coding. We look at the charts and look at the numbers with this context in mind.

Other than that, we are quite a small organization, with less than a hundred people, and there are only 30 in-house developers. That’s also something that, in terms of managers, is important. We don’t have that many managers that need to look into all those metrics. We are a little bit different set up at the moment.

I guess that’s all. Thank you for having me and thank you for the great job that you are doing at Waydev. I’m looking forward to new, exciting features on your platform.