How Bobble.ai pushed delivery velocity by 2.2X and maker time by 1.5X for developers using Hatica’s actionable engineering insights.

About Bobble.ai

Bobble.ai has come a long way in its journey of enabling 80M+ users to personalize their communication in more than 100+ languages. Bobble.ai calls itself The World’s first Conversation Media Platform. Its flagship product Bobble Indic Keyboard allows real-time content creation and personalization through its leading-edge AI technology. It is the highest-rated, most engaging, and retaining keyboard in the world. 

In the pursuit of empowering brands to have enriching everyday conversations with their end consumers, Bobble.ai must deliver technology innovation at scale and fast. However, in an engineering team as big as 100 (and growing), it can be really challenging to align everyone with the same business goals, not have overlap of work, or wasted effort. Even worse, engineering leaders can find it difficult to pinpoint the real cause of a team's inefficiencies (or inadequacies), low productivity and slow moving timelines.

Scaling up Engineering Teams

Once the engineering team at Bobble.ai started seeing the data flow in, the engineering leaders realized that the data in itself didn’t give much of a comprehensive picture. The ownership of projects was not aligned. 

“It was a tedious and a painstaking process to gather data points in retrospect that wasted a lot of time and effort of our teams which otherwise could be used to focus on the product delivery.” adds Rahul. On top of it, the team saw frequent change in product requirements. 

This led to the overall low morale and productivity of the engineering team.  Delayed timelines, working over-hours with no effective output had them off. Clearly, there were issues with how the work was being prioritized and distributed across the teams.

Teams within teams didn’t understand which work mattered the most and ended up spending time in ad hoc tasks that kept coming in from the product teams every now and then. 

“We could clearly see that our teams were occupied all the time but the results didn’t match the quantum of effort put in by everyone. Their productivity was taking a hit and they were not enjoying the process at all. Nor were we. There was significant under-utilization of the resources and we could sense the unrest creeping in.”, adds Rahul. 

Rahul and his team started looking out for an engineering analytics platform that could help them map the gaps in their existing dev-workflow processes, alignment issues and low velocity. 

Reducing Developer Toil & Improving Velocity

Hatica came with its powerful and actionable dashboards. The various dashboards enabled Bobble.ai’s team to gather insights from various work apps at code, project and team level. 

Hatica showcased its slick and easy to navigate platform that hosted multiple dashboards. “With Hatica’s insightful dashboards, I could visualize the end-to-end workflow process in my head, know what worked and what didn’t and where we needed to course correct. Not mere data points but how they stitch to each other for a comprehensive outlook at our engineering’s team performance.”, quips Rahul.

Since Day1 of going live with Hatica, Bobble.ai uncovered some important insights quite early on:

1. There was a disproportionate unplanned work in comparison to the planned work for a given sprint cycle.
2. Tasks were not properly assigned to their rightful stakeholders thereby giving important timelines and information a missed opportunity.
3. Confirmed that there were ad hoc tasks being shipped form the product team to the engineering team without adequate prioritization and criticality.
4. Resources were aligned to projects that were either uncritical or spent more time on resolving bugs instead of writing new code.
5. Rise in the number of failed deployments and hence more time spent fixing those thus impacting the Change Failure Rate (CFR) and Mean time to Resolution (MTTR)

These findings helped the engineering team at Bobble.ai to point out the inefficiencies across the software development life cycle. 

There was communication debt between various stakeholders leading multiple projects. There was a poor understanding in terms of the priority and criticality of the projects which percolated to the developer level as seen from the Effort Alignment and Project Delivery Overview dashboards.

DORA metrics dashboard helped Bobble.ai realize multiple failed deployments because of unreviewed PRs being merged. In order to ship more and faster, release quality was being impacted because of poor practices being followed. This translated into more meetings happening in a given day, less uninterrupted time available for developers to code leaving developers tired and less productive. All this information was readily available on Hatica’s Team-Well being dashboard.

Bobble.ai’s engineering team and leadership could now pin-point with confidence and adequate data points that where they were getting it all wrong and what corrective actions they could take to bridge process inefficiencies.

Boosting Overall Developer Experience

Engineering Leadership at Bobble.ai has seen significant benefits with Hatica’s useful insights thereby optimizing its engineering operations. They have seen improvements with the overall release management enabling teams to take up priority projects first. The overall project velocity has increased by 2.2X thus boosting the developers’ confidence in the work they are delivering.

Engineering Teams can now implement incremental improvements by not spending much time in ad hoc tasks, or unduly long meetings fixing failed deployments, or spending time writing bugs or clearing the technical-debt. Priorities are set in advance and assigned to the rightful owners to avoid any confusion, overlap of work resulting in wasted effort thereby having a balanced distribution of resources across projects.

Bobble.ai has been able to identify how frequently developers went in and out of context because of pepper sprayed meetings and other non-core activities throughout the work day. With Hatica, individuals and teams were able to manage their day better thereby pushing the productive hours by 1.5X for 50% of the developers who had below average maker time available to them previously. 

Engineering Managers can now have meaningful conversations up and down the hierarchy while staying aligned with the company goals and ensuring that their teams are at their productive best and happy.