TripleLift Uses Velocity to Hone KPIs For Data-Driven Decision Making

TripleLift is a revolutionary AdTech company elevating brands with advanced targeting and design-forward branding. Behind the company is a large team of high-performing software engineers. Engineering Manager Chris Oman knew his team was making a significant impact on the business, but needed a way to quantify and communicate that impact. Since adopting Code Climate Velocity, Oman has been able to leverage a host of engineering metrics to demonstrate the team’s progress.

In a constantly evolving industry like AdTech, software engineers must move quickly and continually innovate to remain competitive. Evaluating metrics and key performance indicators (KPIs) to drive improvements is part of the company’s commitment to continuous learning and growth. For TripleLift’s organization of more than 120 engineers, this has changed over the past year, as the team works to hone in on KPIs that truly measure developer success.

“Velocity uses our actual data so we can find areas of improvement instead of relying on gut instinct alone,” said Oman.

Oman uses Velocity several times a week to keep a pulse on how his team is performing and see where they may be running into roadblocks. Before adopting Velocity, Oman said he was not reporting on these metrics at all, so there was little opportunity to demonstrate developer productivity and value to management.

The platform has helped TripleLift increase PR Throughput by 46%, Push Count by 77%, and Commit Volume by 62%. The team also looks at the PR Resolution metric, which shows outliers and helps spotlight good behaviors and so they can replicate best practices across teams.

Guiding Developers to Personal Success

Team360 views in Velocity help Engineering Managers at TripleLift keep teams on track to meet their goals. Transparency into workflows enables leaders to better understand how teams operate and pass learnings along to other developers. Using these insights, the team is able to improve processes and productivity. They’ve also been able to enhance team retrospectives by looking at the PR Resolution module, which shows the journey of a Pull Request from the first commit to when it is merged (or in some cases, where it is abandoned or closed).

Oman said after using Velocity he is more conscious of PR Cycle Times. Since introducing the platform, TripleLift’s Cycle Time has decreased.

Notably, Velocity provided Oman with important insights to help manage individual developers.

“We had individual contributors that I know were doing great work but it was being overlooked because they were not committing code as frequently as they should,” he explained. “I was able to coach them to commit more frequently. In other cases, I’ve been able to reward high performers, and discourage unhealthy practices across teams, like working on weekends.”

At TripleLift, leadership knows that engineering productivity is about more than just coding — there is a holistic value that teams bring to the business. With Velocity, they have the metrics and insights to show impact and drive efficiency and improvements to remain competitive in the fast-paced AdTech world.

Learn how Velocity can help your engineering organization reduce Cycle Time and incorporate data into decision making. Speak with a product specialist.