Sleuth 2.0: the Pulse of the Engineering Organization

Operationalizing metrics is key

Over the past five years Sleuth has helped hundreds of teams scale up their engineering insights platforms, and we’ve seen one recurring characteristic of successful organizations - the operationalization of core KPIs of quality and flow.

Teams that build a pretty dashboard and review it once a month rarely persist with their engineering transformation efforts for more than a few months.

On the other hand, teams that incorporate a select number of target metrics into their weekly planning, sprint reviews, and other rituals almost always see immediate improvements.

For this reason, one year ago we set about building the next generation of Sleuth, code-named Pulse for the heartbeat of the Engineering organization.

Engineering Reviews for all

We built Sleuth v2 from the ground-up to focus on repeatable Reviews, ceremonial rhythms of engineering teams like weekly planning, monthly CTO Directs, quarterly exec reviews, etc. - with templates for every type of activity, and the ability to create your own templates to match your team cadences.

Each Engineering Review template comes with drag-and-drop metrics widgets to customize exactly the layout your team needs, workflows to enable PR-style submissions and review, interactive commenting and notifications, and more.

Our litmus test for every aspect of the new product has been, “will we use this ourselves?”

For example, we wanted to incorporate a DevEx survey element into the app to capture developer sentiment through projects and over time.

However, we didn’t want to build another heavy browser-based survey tool. We just wanted to ask developers a question or two, every once in a while, that they can respond to in Slack then get on with their day. So we built that in Pulse.

Lightweight interactions and the metrics you care about have been our driving mantra.

Why we built this

Two years ago, many of our new customers were focused on DORA metrics, and rightfully so, as for the first time we had a set of industry-agreed metrics with real research and outcome-focused benchmarks.

What we’ve learned by working with so many of these customers, is that DORA is just an entry point - it’s a mindset, and a way to initiate internal process transformation, but it doesn’t solve the “how do we actually operationalize this??” problem.

This is what led us to re-thinking our entire solution - rather than show you pretty graphs, we will help you understand what is actually changing, where your bottlenecks are, how to improve, and importantly, automate the reporting around all of this so you and your teams can focus on building product. Less time measuring, more time building.

Sleuth 2.0 is a fully-interactive, collab-style engineering metrics tool. Benchmarking tools like Figma, Miro, Coda, Notion, Craft, etc., our focus was on creating a collaborative environment, not a BI tool. Read more about why we think dashboards are dead and how they can divide instead of unite your team.

We’ve had a number of trial customers testing the product over the last few months, and the response has been amazing - teams are hungry for useful, actionable insights that will drive real outcomes, not just metrics for the sake of metrics. That has been our driving North Star, and we’d love to show it to you. Talk to us to get a demo!