Photo by zhang kaiyv on Unsplash

It was probably after summer 2019

Dave announced internally he was stepping aside from his role at TravelPerk, and I went for lunch with Avi. TravelPerk needed to scale up the engineering team — at that time, we were probably around 35 engineers, which was not a very big team for a 300–400-person company. There were many areas we wanted to automate, but we didn’t have enough bandwidth to do so.

As an entrepreneur, I quickly linked the dots with the kind of customer-lifecycle problems you face when trying to attract, activate, retain, and develop customers. I started applying similar patterns to manage technical talent. We began building a metrics foundation for every step of the process — because you can only improve what you measure.

Google Sheets everywhere. We even started collecting data manually. In the end, managing talent doesn’t have the same volume as managing customers in a B2C company — so why not?

But then we reached probably the most complex and poorly understood area: how to measure the contribution of the team. That’s essential when you scale, but it became even more critical when, in March 2020, COVID hit all of us and we had to transform a face-to-face culture into a fully remote one in just a few days.

What was the challenge

Being able to proactively act on how the newbies were landing, who was struggling with lockdown, or how the new teams were fitting together was almost impossible.

We evaluated many tools in the market and even had the budget to acquire one — until that budget disappeared when your customers stop travelling for months. So we built our own internal service, scraping data from our CI and code repositories. Based on SDLC metrics (time to review, pull request size, time to merge, volume of comments, etc.), we defined baselines, evaluated the different teams, and acted proactively.

We were not obsessed with DORA metrics — we were already an elite team in almost all four topics covered by that framework — and we also implemented our own ad-hoc SPACE metrics surveys. Combined with all the HR Ops metrics, we had a full picture of what was happening… with just a few hundred (kidding) Google Sheets.

What was the impact

Thanks to that initiative, we consolidated a data-driven culture in engineering management. With that crafted approach, we were able to:

• Define baselines and react proactively to issues in newbies’ onboarding.

• Define baselines and react proactively to performance issues in new and existing teams.

• Define baselines and react proactively to issues with individual members — which, during COVID, was a critical effort.

• Define team-level SLAs each quarter to keep evolving the operational maturity of every team.

And even more nuanced outcomes — identifying bottlenecks in our architecture by spotting areas that weren’t evolving at the same pace as others; identifying members who had a natural cross-company impact (people acting as Staff+ engineers just by the numbers); and detecting conflicts or storming phases in teams through spikes in their collaboration baselines; and many others.

In the end, data is not for taking decisions — it was for triggering the right conversations. I feel very proud to have been part of that transformational chapter in TravelPerk’s history — bringing the data-driven culture that existed across the company into the heart of engineering operations.

A few years after

A few years later, I found myself joining a completely different company — in a completely different stage. It was initially operating with mostly outsourced members, spread across multiple time zones, speaking different languages, and shaped by a very different culture and set of engineering principles.

I remember spending evenings revisiting Erin Meyer’s “Culture Map” to better understand how to bridge those gaps.

We were releasing manually, had limited test coverage, and faced the usual realities of hypergrowth — constant reprioritization, overlapping roadmaps, and a mix of legacy decisions and new ambitions colliding.

Add to that the human side: many teammates had just relocated due to the Ukrainian war, adjusting to a new country and living with a sense of uncertainty about their jobs.

It wasn’t an exceptional situation — it’s what many execs face when scaling fast in complex environments.

But you can’t stop the music. You haven’t been hired to give excuses; you need to keep delivering while diagnosing the team and making critical decisions — very often operating in the dark. At a certain scale, it becomes impossible to do your job — and to support your fellow executives and co-founders — without the right tools and the right visibility.

This is the job

Photo by Matt Hudson on Unsplash

Did I just have bad luck? Not really. I’ve been a privileged professional, and I’m deeply grateful for my career — my time as an entrepreneur, at TravelPerk, at AltoVita, and in recent years as an advisor.

The challenges I’ve described above are not exceptional. This is the job.

The conversations between non-tech founders and engineering leaders sound familiar everywhere:

“Do we have the right team? I want more shipment, more delivery, more quality. I’m tired of being known as the ‘no’ team.”

Relying on your (spider) senses has limitations — mostly because, as I mentioned before, you can’t improve what you can’t measure.

Turning the lights on

One thing I love is landing ideas. I have a personal Notion where, just for fun, I commit to writing One-Pagers with ideas every year. (My little version of Rick Rubin’s seeds 🙂) It doesn’t matter how crazy they are. I no longer have the drive to execute them all, but I love the creative side of writing them down.

When we built the crafted version of TravelPerk’s engineering metrics, I remember presenting Avi the One-Pager and having a conversation about the huge opportunity if we built something meaningful. We agreed to test it with real data and revisit it later.

So when Dave, a few months back, committed to solving this problem and started working with Bernardo, it was impossible not to look twice. And when they offered me to join the engineering team, it was a no-brainer.

We’re in the middle of a complete reshape of our industry — AI is changing how we build, but also how we deploy and lead tech teams — and the only way I know how to face this is to get dirty, to get in the mud. Working with Dave has always been a guarantee of fun, pragmatism, and no-bullshit culture. The team is fantastic. But also… being able to work on the problem domain I’ve been researching and writing about for the past few years is just a privilege.

So yeah — we’re turning the lights on.

We’re building the tool I wish I had as an engineering leader, and I hope you won’t want to miss it.

If you’ve ever tried to understand your team through data — and felt the frustration of doing it with spreadsheets, or with tools that only rely on ticket lifecycles or member surveys, without getting a holistic and factual view — stay tuned. We’re building something for you.

And if you want to join a blue-ocean opportunity — and help shape how engineering teams navigate this new technology age — check out our careers page.