Engineering teams can track their productivity by using metrics, but their managers have no easy way of comparing and tracking their growth as individuals or as a team overall. Compiling data to use for performance reviews can be tedious. Advocating the team’s success to company decision makers can be challenging without a comprehensive overview of the team’s impact.
We want to help Engineering Managers grow their teams by visualizing insights from company repositories. If managers can use our visual insights to communicate trends to their teams, we expect to see improvement in code velocity week over week.
Grow engineering talent to ship products faster.
When I joined the team in July 2019, Agni had already interviewed potential candidates that would benefit from a tool such as this. There were common themes and pain points that surfaced in many of his conversations. My favorite insight being that it was common for an Engineer Manager to try to DIY a solution to track metrics and team progress and then abandon their self made systems. The need was real!
Using Miro as our virtual project space, we compiled our insights from Agni's discussions and formatted rudimentary buckets to understand our user using Laura Klein's grid system - defining facts, user problems, their behaviors and their goals.
Talking with potential users also helped define our constraints and inform our most important features. Asking what they currently use to track performance gave us several metrics to consider and we landed on five that we should focus on in our solution.
Besides our core problem of compiling concise insights for managers to track, there were a few other needs that surfaced. What does a manager do with the visual insights our tool creates? What needs arise from there? We pulled three use cases out of our research that highlighted the way we could make our tool even more useful!
Once we had met and agreed on our constraints and our minimum viable product requirements it was time to start sketching and wire-framing.
First thing to tackle was the dashboard itself. Instead of designing the dashboard in its entirety I split it into two parts. I had a list of navigation and customization requirements that I worked on as a framework, using a placeholder for the graph itself. Then separately I looked at how the graph would function on its own. Breaking this into chunks was much more approachable and much faster to iterate on.
In our first discussion we started with expressing our personal preferences, what we liked or didn't like, but we turned our attention to what these options meant for usability and ease of implementation. We picked apart what would work and what we wanted to ditch moving forward.
Similar to the navigation wireframes, my four graph prototypes were first looked at through an aesthetic lens but we agreed on one that we wanted to use until we could test its usability. We came back to these several times while we flushed out the nitty gritty details of implementing our MVP features. There are many ways to eat a kiwi!
Several meetings and a few months later, my work was finalizing the high fidelity prototype using Figma. Agni had previously implemented a marketing website to gauge interest. Taking a cue from his aesthetics I was able to pull colors, fonts and illustration style over to our dashboard with amazing results!
Engtrics Dashboard
