Case Study

How Xactly Built an Engineering Culture of Efficiency

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Xactly is an end-to-end revenue management solution that helps businesses build, manage, and optimize their sales organizations.

+17%

IN AVAILABLE DEV TIME

ABOUT XACTLY

  • Industry Sales tech
  • Engineering Org Size 200+ developers
  • Dev Tool Stack Jira, GitHub, Slack, Google Calendar

Over the years, Xactly has evolved from a single point product to a comprehensive Intelligent Revenue Platform (IRP) that provides timely insights across the entire Sales Performance Management value chain — from pipeline forecasting to execution, including compensation optimization. 

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Peter Drucker’s "You can't improve what you can’t measure" is one of the fundamental principles at Xactly Engineering. With this philosophy, Xactly has placed a high value on engineering metrics reporting, especially with its expanding global presence. The decades of unique data and artificial intelligence that inform Xactly’s models has meant significant investment in engineering, and the team now numbers more than 200 developers. 

But that growth also introduced a company-wide initiative to optimize for efficiency, efficacy and productivity. “We’d gotten to the point in our growth that it was time to start evaluating the ROI of engineering,” explains Kandarp Desai, Xactly’s SVP of Engineering. “Were we efficient enough? Did we have gaps in our process that we needed to fix? Were we investing our budget wisely?”

The Problem: Visibility

Xactly’s challenge was that it was incredibly difficult to predict and measure the efficiency of its engineering teams due to poor visibility into how those teams were actually working. Xactly had an engineering analytics tool that provided some delivery metrics. But if an engineer was spending three hours on Slack working on an ad-hoc request, or another developer was pulled into four hours of Zoom meetings, there was no record of those activities. It hampered engineering leadership’s ability to make data-driven optimizations.

Kandarp wanted to determine if his organization was experiencing the Productivity Paradox, but a comprehensive view of the data was necessary to make this assessment:

“The tools we were using were giving us slices of visibility into one metric at one point of time in one location. We weren’t able to see the 360° view of all of our engineering effort and the apples-to-apples comparison across teams. I’d ask my managers for a complete view of what teams were working on, and they’d have to explain that that work just wasn’t being captured by our previous platform.”

Kandarp Desai, Global VP of Engineering

A Holistic View with Uplevel

Kandarp and his team decided to adopt Uplevel to gain a more comprehensive view of their engineering activities. Xactly's technical program management team collaborated with Uplevel’s customer success team to deploy Uplevel as an engineering analytics solution across their organization.

Uplevel leverages machine learning and advanced data science to analyze a wide array of tools and collaboration data, uncovering critical signals that guide leaders in driving organizational change. 

allocation-insights

Uplevel provides a number of metrics and insights: 

  • Advanced time allocation that explains how engineering time is actually being spent — including in Slack, meetings, and OOO, and despite poor Jira hygiene

  • Standard DORA metrics for delivery efficiency and quality 

  • “Sustained Always On” metrics that indicate a potential risk for burnout based on available dev time and after-hours work

  • Unique metrics around deep work, PR complexity, blocked PRs, cycle time vs. lead time, and more

Using Uplevel, Kandarp was able to identify clear opportunities for increasing efficiency: 

  • Some complex code reviews were only taking five minutes and Uplevel revealed that Xactly’s bug rate was high. Kandarp recognized an opportunity for more training and guidance around code reviews to reduce bug rate.

  • Using Uplevel for a more holistic view of what was taking up developer time showed a large amount of unplanned work in the form of Slack requests and ad hoc meetings. Addressing these allowed Xactly to increase available dev time by 17% on average.

  • Uplevel revealed that not all commits were linked to the appropriate Jira issue — a gap in process but also in an important SOC control. Optimizing for these changes improved operational process efficiency and also helped Xactly maintain compliance.

But another, unexpected change came in the way Kandarp thinks about engineering metrics. 

“I used to be very committed to the idea that individual metrics were the way to identify problems,” he says. “Uplevel helped me change my perspective. I'm no longer worrying about individual productivity.”

Hear firsthand how Kandarp approaches process optimizations holistically with Uplevel:

Building a Stronger Engineering Culture at Xactly

As Xactly has been able to focus more on the bigger picture, Kandarp recognizes that this shift has helped create a culture of trust with his managers and individual contributors.  “That’s not just one thing,” he says. “That’s all the metrics collectively.” No longer relying on just GitHub metrics, Kandarp’s entire organization is optimizing for getting things done and creating ROI.

“I can see their confidence increasing, which is important, and that trust between us is the pillar on which everything else is built. I want my team to be healthy. If team health is good, then there’s nothing stopping us from achieving long-term productivity and efficiency. Uplevel just gives us that ability to do it right.”

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