How does Uplevel help engineering teams? Our productivity software identifies patterns in real-time data from the programs your teams use daily, generating uniquely insightful reports that empower your engineers to do their best work. This information shows engineers the way toward higher effectiveness and arms managers with actionable insights for meetings with direct reports and executives.
To see how Uplevel leads to victory, consider these real use cases from managers using Uplevel.
Situation #1: Building trust while supporting flexible working hours
Uplevel sent Alice a notification via Slack that this employee was “above normal” on our Always On scale, meaning that they had been working longer days than their normal levels for the past week.
Alice manages a developer that often disappears during the day and this notification signalled that she may not be understanding the full story of how this employee is adapting to a new world of work. While much-needed mental breaks were typical during COVID—Alice empathizes with her employees that are juggling a lot at home—she wanted to make sure she was supporting this employee the best she could.
This suggested to Alice that this person was likely needing to take more breaks when the rest of the team was online during the day, but then had to catch up later to get their work done at different times. . Instead of casting doubt, Alice now had the information to support this developer during a difficult time of working from home. And now had data to support her conversations with the employee around potential burnout.
“This year, I’ve encouraged my team members to find what works for them. Uplevel helps me understand their unique patterns without micromanaging.”
Situation #2: Removing barriers and protecting Deep Work time
Rajiv is an engineering manager at a logistics company. He manages a team of three engineers that are primarily responsible for tackling bugs. He noticed that the bug percentage was growing along with the lack of deep work. The team kept getting pulled into fire drills and had a hard time stepping back and looking for bigger solutions.
Driven to protect his team’s time, Rajiv wanted to track an important upstream metric: bug load. This data had not been readily available in past years, but Uplevel makes it accessible on one simple report. Now, Rajiv sees data about Jira activity, including which tickets from other teams are assigned to his team. He can even see the average timeline for a ticket, from “created” to “in progress,” which helps illustrate the issue in meetings with his colleagues and executive leadership.
This data resulted in two key victories. Rajiv was able to identify and address Jira hygiene issues across teams in his organization. Uplevel data served as a critical conversation-starter to discuss closing tickets. Furthermore, he was prepared for truly data-driven conversations, unlike the vague ideas that supported meetings before Uplevel. Rajiv set up time with his fellow managers to review his team dashboard and establish a smarter workflow.
“This is exactly the data that I wanted to pull out. Really helpful info that you provided—I’m meeting with another manager today to discuss. Thank you!”
What initially felt like an unsolvable problem – protecting his team’s deep work time from randomizing work from other teams – was actually able to be addressed by looking at upstream metrics and holding others accountable. Uplevel allowed Rajiv and his colleagues to do better business planning and address their tech debt with more deep work time, and thereby reduce their bug percentage.
These are just a few use cases of Uplevel. Ready for data-driven insights that lift your team to its highest potential? Reach out for a personalized demo.