How Accolade Meets Commitments Effectively with Engineering Intelligence

“If You Don’t Measure It, You Can’t Improve It”

Fostering an effective and aligned engineering organization is critical to the mission — and Executive Vice President of Engineering Drew Garner explains why visibility was a prerequisite:

Prior to seeking an engineering intelligence platform, Garner and his leadership team relied on their own internal systems to track code submissions and deployments and “leader’s intuition” to infer what might be happening in between. Were there incidents that were taking the team’s focus away from shipping efficiently? Were they drowning in meetings or distracted by Slack messages? 

“The biggest value for me as the head of engineering here is the focus on the health of the person and the team,” Garner explains. “To be effective, you simply need to be able to protect your time and let your builders build.”

But intuition became a lot more difficult as Accolade expanded into a global team and embraced remote work. Not being able to sit next to their employees in person left managers guessing about their teams’ well-being and burnout risk. Accolade needed a tool to help their distributed engineering org emulate the effectiveness and alignment of an onsite team.

Gaining Visibility and Actioning Change with Uplevel

“The impact of deep work on productivity is well researched,” Garner explains, “but everything is more interesting with correlated data.” Uplevel’s insights allowed Accolade’s engineering leaders to save time searching for patterns in their systems and provided a starting point for conversations with teams to increase focus time. Accolade implemented frameworks and training to promote deep work and identified highly effective teams to serve as models for best practices.

Accolade’s engineering leadership observed an "almost exact correlation" between deep work and context-switching metrics surfaced by Uplevel and employee engagement reported in developer surveys. This correlation extended to managers, indicating that increasing deep work positively influenced team health organization-wide. Focusing on developer experience and optimizing non-production processes helped the team to accelerate.

Garner also reports that Uplevel’s PR Complexity metric helped surface pull requests where junior engineers could be encouraged to test and ship more often. With Uplevel-enabled training, frameworks, and improved conversations, Accolade reduced fear around testing and shipping, leading to more frequent deployments of higher-quality code. This helped Garner’s team deliver on the year’s commitments to a data platform and ML models that could support a personalized healthcare experience at scale as the business continues to grow.

At the forefront of Uplevel and Accolade’s success has been a commitment to partnership. “The Uplevel team has been responsive to our feedback and often builds our feature requests into their roadmap,” Garner says. This partnership has also allowed Accolade to continue to set its sights on more aggressive goals.

What's Next for Accolade

Over the next year, Garner plans to increase the amount of production deployments faster than growing the resourcing of his team. He sees Uplevel as a way to maximize that effectiveness. But it’s not an easy task. 

“We have a lot of goals as an organization: increasing profit margins, delivering more business value, improving products within our platform, introducing the “wow” factor to our members,” he explains. “Engineering is a creative job, but that means we don’t have repetitive instructions. We have to sharpen our own tool kit…and we need data and telemetry to do that.”