How Uplevel empowers over 1,000 engineers at Avalara

Avalara cares deeply about enabling a positive experience for its engineers. The Seattle-based company provides cloud-based, real-time solutions for managing tax compliance—and as an organization managing over 30,000 customers and nearly 18 billion tax calculations, engineering effectiveness is a top priority.

Needing new tools for engineers while scaling

Avalara has around 3,000 employees working across 13 international offices, which stretches the concept of standard working hours for its nearly 1,000 engineers. Following strong recent growth (and wanting to avoid team burnout), the company was seeking tools to improve the engineering experience. That’s where Uplevel got involved.

“It was a natural fit as we were growing and setting goals around: “What is efficiency? What is effectiveness? What is engagement?” It’s a great tool for our first-line managers.”
– Marilyn Bond, VP of Engineering Execution Excellence at Avalara

Here at Uplevel, our role as an engineering effectiveness platform is to give engineers a great experience at work so they can do work they’re truly proud of—a goal that Avalara shared. The platform now empowers Avalara to quantify and improve engineering effectiveness by providing front-line managers and engineers with insights related to Deep Work, context switching, PR velocity, and burnout.

“Before Uplevel, our first-line managers were just driving execution. [With Uplevel] they can drive towards better efficiency, effectiveness, and collaboration because they have the data to make the right decisions.”

Hear the full story from the Avalara team in the video below.