The Braze engineering team has grown rapidly to nearly 200 people today. In addition to feature development, they prioritize platform stability, scalability, and value delivery to meet these high business stakes. As a result, the organization's evergreen focus is maintaining product stability and continually improving the platform for its customers.
Why Braze sought out engineering intelligence
Braze faced a problem common in scaling tech companies: a lack of visibility into how much time and resources engineering spent on value demand and new feature work. To maximize value demand, they needed to better understand the cost of failure demand work (maintaining operations, fixing bugs, and addressing incidents) and continually work to reduce it.
They needed a clearer view of the actual cost of maintenance across their 14 teams. Before using Uplevel, insights into these maintenance costs were anecdotal. Braze wanted a data-backed, quantitative approach to better allocate engineering resources.
“We tracked server costs and computational costs, but we didn’t efficiently track how many bugs we had or how much time we spent fixing problems,” Francisco Trindade, VP of Engineering at Braze, explains. “We wanted to bring that knowledge to the surface."
Choosing the right tool
Prior to seeking out engineering intelligence, Braze relied on small-scale, manual processes for estimation, like using Excel and story points in Jira. These approaches were not practical for capturing and unifying data across a large engineering organization. Lack of standardization across groups made it difficult to get a consistent view of how teams were spending time meant for engineering tasks.
When looking for better alternatives, Francisco found many tools that approached engineering analytics from a primarily financial perspective – reducing the budget for engineering teams, for example. But the Braze goal was to focus on improving customer value delivery rather than just cutting costs.
Why Braze Chose Uplevel
Uplevel’s emphasis on deep work, improving developer flow, and insights into time investment — rather than a purely financial analysis — aligned with the vision at Braze.
“Uplevel is aligned with our focus on tracking investment time to help us allocate time more effectively and work more collaboratively with our engineers," Francisco says. He values Uplevel's ability to track deep work because he wanted data that leaders could show to their teams to foster productive conversations.
Uplevel is selective in which data it surfaces on individual engineers. Any data that could potentially be used to stack rank engineers is only shown at the team level — but as deep work data reveals external factors that might be influencing devs’ ways of working, it forms a great starting point for individual conversations.
Leveraging data to improve outcomes
"Leadership is making the invisible visible."
Uplevel's data has led to better decision-making at Braze. It helps them track team performance, understand where time is spent, and drive initiatives to focus more on delivering value to customers. The tool has also fostered team-level discussions about process improvements and reduced the time spent on distractions.
For example, Braze publishes monthly Uplevel reports with each team's meeting time percentage, which has sparked productive discussions about how to maximize deep work time. "Some teams, noticing they have more meetings than others, have begun consulting teams with lower meeting times to learn and improve. This type of cross-team learning might not have happened as seamlessly without this data," Francisco says.
Braze recently expanded its use of Uplevel across the entire engineering organization. Francisco says that the Uplevel team has been highly proactive in their partnership, regularly seeking feedback on improvement and ensuring alignment with the Braze team’s evolving needs.
Insights such as time in deep work allocated to customer-facing improvements have become central to the Braze engineering strategy. Targeted changes, like budgeting for tech debt investments to reduce incidents and adjusting fragmented team meeting schedules, have led to more efficient operations and a better focus on continuous value delivery.
The visibility into engineering time and tasks has enabled Braze engineering leaders to make informed prioritization decisions and better align team efforts with company goals.
Looking ahead
According to Francisco, understanding and optimizing engineering investment is still in its early stages across the industry. Engineering teams often get sidetracked by issues or requests, making it challenging to maintain their roadmap and balance alignment with autonomy. He believes the most effective way to improve output is to ensure engineers stay focused on their planned work, free from distractions or repetitive tasks.
Engineering can become faster and more effective by improving quality and reducing operational drag — something Francisco sees Uplevel as well-positioned to support. With Uplevel’s proactive engagement and advanced engineering intelligence platform, Braze is confident that its teams will continue delivering consistent value without compromise.
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