Show HN: Adadot – analytics for better, happier developers
Developers are increasingly under pressure to be more productive and ship faster. However, its difficult to improve what you cannot see or measure.
My role (Alex) was in operations and I was collaborating with Sales, Finance and other teams. All these teams had systems like Salesforce and SAP that helped them quantify what “good looks like”.
Meanwhile engineering (Jason’s background), was flying blind and spending up to two hours a day patching data together for their sprint meetings.
Some of the challenges that we faced in trying to solve this for ourselves were that:
Most of the data a developer can use for insight is fragmented and spread across multiple tools like Gitlab / Github / Jira / Slack / Calendar Most of the insight is organised around tasks / projects. While this type of information is helpful to an extent, at the end of the day were people managing people Typical developer metrics were one-dimensional. Developers who were great collaborators always seemed to score lower on classic productivity metrics but they add true value
Our goal is to help developers improve the way they work, collaborate, and feel through data.
Software in this space has traditionally focused on monitoring developers and their performance for the benefit of their manager. We took a different approach.
Adadot is developer-centric meaning that we focus on empowering each developer to improve their own working patterns with data that only admins in their company would have been previously able to access. Team managers can see aggregated data only. Any individual developer can sign up and use Adadot without having to be part of a team licence.
More importantly, the work of a developer is not just code and its our core belief that the current definitions around productivity are limited. Burnout is a very real problem. Great collaborators and people who lift their teams up are underserved by code-focused engineering productivity tools.
Right as we started building Adadot Github's SPACE https://queue.acm.org/detail.cfm?id=3454124 productivity came about scientifically validating our thinking!
Finally, we figured that no developer on the planet wants to manually enter data. So we found a way to collect and process data automatically through integrations.
For now the output is dashboards and benchmarks centered around three core data themes:
Work: Classic data-driven engineering metrics, like deployment speed and failure rate. Identify blockers in real time
Collaboration: Understanding if the work is happening in silos, if the team are helping each other (eg. with code reviews, participating in Support channel) and if messages and meetings are becoming a distraction
Wellbeing: Helping you to uncover unhealthy working patterns and protect yourself and your team from burnout. Is there enough Focus time for deep code work and when? Surfacing upskilling and new languages that are being used
What this is not: A monitoring tool that will tell you (or your manager) who in your team has been lazy.
Results: We are seeing teams improve velocity by up to 50% within the first 30 days. 70% also maintain the rate of improvement for at least 3 months meaning that they are able to increase their productivity sustainably.
Individual developers are using it to improve their collaboration visibility and gain promotions to managerial positions.
Check out:
Our demo: https://share.vidyard.com/watch/XEctQFzdQpMgpnjY4giFNV
Public Roadmap: https://adadot.prodcamp.com/
Knowledge base: https://adadothelp.document360.io/
Our Ask: If you are a developer - we would love for you to try Adadot and give us your feedback. We have a free plan and also offer free trials at https://adadot.com/
Looking forward to hearing everyone's thoughts in the comments below, and please don't hesitate to ask me and the rest of the team any questions you might have!
> What this is not: A monitoring tool that will tell you (or your manager) who in your team has been lazy.
At least, not until the enterprise money shows up.
On the other hand, each developer is given access to data that previously only the admin in his company would see. We have plenty of examples of developers using that data to advocate for themselves for better working conditions or promotions.
Just for clarity, the data that Adadot shows already belongs to the company so if you work for a place that wants to monitor you and treat you unfairly they have plenty of opportunity to do so without spending money on us.
There are also much better tools for monitoring than Adadot which they can use.
We have made a very conscious decision to do things this way eventhough in some cases it might cost us customers. Hope this helps.
Throughout the years, I have watched myself, my colleagues and friends struggle to understand how to go faster without burning out in both startups and unicorn companies.
I wanted to build something that helps the broader community and I am very happy to be sharing this with you today!
Super excited to hear your thoughts about it!!
I am George, one of the developers of the team! One of the main reasons I started programming was to provide to the community and Adadot really does that. Our sole purpose is to support the developers in order to reach their peak without risking a mental burnout.
Your feedback is valuable for us, so feel free to contact any of us
I've shared with our CTO - he really liked your public roadmap :)