One shared understanding of engineering productivity across individual contributors, managers, and leadership.

PERSUIT is a legal technology platform that helps organizations control their external legal spend and achieve better outcomes through value-based pricing rather than traditional billable-hour models. Its global engineering organization works closely with product teams and customers to understand their challenges and deliver valuable products as quickly as possible.

For Justin Nguyen, Director of Engineering at PERSUIT, technology and engineering methodologies are ultimately a means to an end: building great products. That philosophy has made continuous improvement central to how the engineering organization operates and created the need for a better way to understand whether those improvements were actually working.

The challenge: engineering metrics remained subjective and incomplete

Before Pensero, PERSUIT relied on a combination of peer feedback and traditional engineering metrics such as lead time, cycle time, and story points. Although each provided some information, together they still failed to offer a comprehensive and objective view of engineering productivity.

Peer feedback varied depending on who provided it and was not always actionable. Story points remained inherently subjective, while metrics such as cycle time could take weeks or months to reveal whether a change was producing meaningful results. These measures also struggled to account for the different ways engineers contribute, from developing code and completing tickets to reviewing pull requests and supporting other teams.

Managers were left gathering information from multiple tools, conversations, Slack channels, and Jira before adding their own interpretation. This required considerable effort and still created the possibility that different people would reach different conclusions from the same work.

“Those metrics are quite subjective. Peer feedback varies from one peer to another, and it is often not actionable. How do I know objectively what I need to improve—and how do I measure whether I am actually improving?”

PERSUIT needed a metric that could capture the full nature of an engineer’s contribution, automate the underlying analysis, and give the entire organization a framework it could understand and trust.

Why PERSUIT chose Pensero

PERSUIT was not looking for another management dashboard. It wanted a metric that would be useful to leaders and managers while also being adopted and embraced by engineers themselves.

That metric needed to reflect the breadth of engineering work, incentivize positive behaviors, and connect individual contributions to meaningful outcomes. It also needed to be available without forcing managers to spend hours manually collecting and reconciling data.

Other approaches failed to meet those requirements. Some relied heavily on surveys, creating additional work for engineers. Others required so much manual effort that PERSUIT felt it might as well build the solution internally.

Pensero offered a fundamentally different approach: a comprehensive and automated measure of engineering contribution that everyone could access and use.

“We wanted to find a metric that was not only suitable for managers and leaders, but something the whole team could adopt and embrace. It had to capture the essence of someone’s work, incentivize good behavior, and translate into outcomes.”

From historical data to real value in days

Getting started with Pensero was surprisingly simple. After only a few clicks, PERSUIT had access to several years of historical engineering data.

That history gave the team something it had previously struggled to establish: a reliable baseline. Instead of waiting months to accumulate sufficient information, PERSUIT could immediately understand where it was starting from and measure subsequent changes against a consistent reference point.

Within a few days, Justin had explored the dashboards with support from Pensero’s founders and product leadership, identified the signals most relevant to PERSUIT, and started turning them into actions.

One of the most valuable signals was delivery points per headcount. PERSUIT could see its engineering output relative to team size, compare that performance with industry benchmarks, and identify the specific areas in which it was ahead or falling behind.

“One of the key signals was delivery points per headcount. I could immediately compare us with the industry benchmark, understand where we were ahead or behind, and see which areas we should work on.”

A shared metric for engineers and managers

Pensero quickly became more than a reporting tool:

• During its first quarter of use, each engineer viewed Pensero more than 200 times on average. Engineers began openly discussing their Pensero scores, comparing approaches with their peers, identifying friction, and taking greater ownership of their improvement.

• For managers and individual contributors, this changed the nature of performance conversations. Instead of spending meetings reconstructing what had happened or discussing performance from different subjective perspectives, both sides entered the conversation with access to the same information.

The data did not replace managerial judgment or context. Instead, it gave managers a reliable starting point from which to interpret the work, understand circumstances such as cross-team support, and focus the conversation on improvement.

“Now we essentially have the same view. We can talk about how to improve, what the pain points are, and what friction someone is facing rather than spending the conversation trying to establish what happened.”

This also created a significant operational benefit. Previously, managers had to search across tools, channels, and conversations to prepare for a performance review. With the underlying data ready in Pensero, they only needed to provide the context and interpretation that truly required their expertise. Justin estimates that this saves managers days of work during each quarterly or biannual review period.

An objective framework for engineering leadership

Pensero also gave PERSUIT’s engineering leadership a consistent view across teams. Managers could identify where support was needed and address emerging challenges proactively, while senior leaders gained a clearer connection between engineering initiatives and measurable results.

Rather than relying on a technical narrative that could be difficult for the wider business to evaluate, engineering leaders could explain what they had changed, show the resulting impact, share what they had learned, and justify their next plan against an objective metric.

“I now have an objective framework to present to leadership: this is what we did, this is the result of those actions, this is what we learned, and this is why the next plan makes sense.”

Measuring whether AI creates real value

This objective framework became especially valuable as PERSUIT expanded its use of AI. Justin describes himself as an AI realist: he sees its ability to amplify good engineering practices, but also its potential to amplify existing problems.

Writing more code does not necessarily create more value. If AI produces larger pull requests, overwhelms reviewers, or introduces more defects, it may simply move the bottleneck elsewhere. PERSUIT therefore needed to understand not only who was adopting AI, but whether that adoption was improving productivity and engineering outcomes.

Pensero allows the team to compare AI usage with delivery, review pressure, quality, and other engineering signals. This helps PERSUIT decide how broadly to adopt AI, where additional foundations or guardrails are required, and which bottlenecks need to be addressed first.

“How do I know that the business’s investment in AI is translating into real outcomes? Pensero helps us capture AI adoption and understand how that translates into productivity. If we ship more code but bottleneck reviews or create more bugs, that is not necessarily a good outcome.”

The impact: 2.5× higher delivery per engineer

Compared with its Q3 and Q4 2025 baseline, PERSUIT saw an approximately 2.5× increase in delivery points per headcount during its first quarter using Pensero.

The improvement reflected several initiatives, including greater AI adoption and broader work to increase engineering velocity. While the increase can not be fully attributed to Pensero alone, the platform played an important role in making progress visible, directing attention toward the right areas, encouraging individual improvement, and creating shared accountability.

More importantly, Pensero gave everyone a uniform understanding of what engineering velocity and productivity meant. Something that had previously felt abstract and difficult to explain became visible, understandable, and actionable across the organization.

“The biggest impact is a uniform understanding of engineering velocity and productivity. We converted our understanding from subjective to objective and created a basis for everyone to improve upon. Pensero moved something that was a mystery into something visible and understandable.”

Why buying Pensero became a straightforward decision

For PERSUIT, the buying decision centered on a simple leadership question: did the company want to demystify engineering velocity and productivity?

Justin also saw a clear connection between the product and the Pensero team’s first-hand understanding of the problem. Pensero’s features addressed the real pain involved in measuring engineering productivity, while its emphasis on transparency gave the organization confidence in the long-term vision.

“One of the main reasons I decided to move forward was the Pensero team’s understanding of the real pain involved in measuring engineering productivity. The product tackles those pain points head-on with simple but powerful features, and the team’s responsiveness in supporting PERSUIT has been outstanding.”

For Justin, the value of Pensero can ultimately be expressed in three words:

“Demystifying engineering productivity.”