The Discipline
of Focus
Companies that trust Pensero.
For Ignasi, co-founder and CEO of Cubbo, building a high-performing engineering team was never about size.
Cubbo operates a technology-driven logistics platform across Mexico and Brazil, processing over a million orders per month. Behind that scale is a deliberately small engineering team of just 15 people.
The philosophy is simple: small, autonomous teams can outperform larger ones, but that only works if every hour of work is aligned with what truly matters. As the company grew, that alignment became harder to maintain.
“We didn’t know exactly how our work was different from where we wanted to go.”
The challenge
When small teams need better visibility to stay aligned
Cubbo’s engineering visibility was distributed across several tools: Work lived across GitHub, spreadsheets, and later Linear. Each of these systems played a role in organizing and tracking execution, but they didn’t provide a unified view of how engineering efforts were evolving over time or how they connected to broader company priorities.
Work was being tracked, teams were shipping, and processes had matured as the organization grew. But as more teams and responsibilities were added, it became harder to maintain a clear, consistent understanding of how engineering time was being allocated.
“We didn’t know exactly how our work was different from where we wanted to go.”
Over time, natural day-to-day dynamics began to influence execution: Operational needs, incoming requests, and short-term priorities started to take a larger share of engineering capacity. This is a normal evolution in growing teams, but without clear visibility, it became difficult to assess how that balance compared to the intended direction.
“It was very easy for us to get lost. We wanted to go one way, but the day-to-day was pushing us somewhere else.”
For a small team, this made alignment especially important.
With limited capacity, having a clear understanding of where time and effort are going becomes critical to ensuring that the team continues to focus on the highest-impact work.
At the same time, performance conversations remained largely experience-driven.
Managers had strong intuition and context about their teams, but there wasn’t a consistent, shared framework to review work in detail or to reflect on it systematically over time.
A new layer: understanding the impact of AI
As AI tools became more present in the workflow, a new dimension was added to this need for visibility: Adoption happened organically and some engineers quickly incorporated AI into their daily work, while others moved more gradually.
The opportunity was clear, but understanding its real impact required more than observation.
Without a structured way to compare outcomes, it was difficult to fully quantify how AI was influencing productivity or how to best support the team in adopting it.
Cubbo needed a way to make these differences visible, so they could better understand how work was evolving and guide the team accordingly.
Why Pensero changed the conversation
Pensero introduced a new layer of clarity across Cubbo’s engineering organization. By combining signals from their tech stack, it created a unified view of how work was actually happening.
Instead of relying on proxies or manual categorization, the team could now see:
What was being built
How complex the work was
Where effort was going
How execution aligned with priorities
Pensero has become part of the weekly dynamics: Managers and engineers now review real work in one-on-ones, using it as a structured retrospective to understand what happened and how to improve.
“It’s a way to sit with an engineer and show them: this is everything you’ve done, and learn from it.”
It also brought clarity to how work was categorized.
Instead of relying on manually assigned labels, Cubbo could now accurately distinguish between feature development, fixes, and maintenance, something that had previously been difficult to track reliably.
The results
From reactive work to intentional execution
One of the first insights revealed a major misalignment: More than 70% of engineering work was going into maintenance, far from the intended focus.
With that visibility, the team corrected course.
Today, maintenance work is down to ~30%, allowing the team to focus on more strategic initiatives.
Pensero became a constant checkpoint to ensure that execution stays aligned with priorities, not driven by the urgency of the day-to-day.
Full AI adoption, driven by evidence
Pensero also played a key role in Cubbo’s transition to AI-assisted development.
By making differences in productivity visible, it helped the team understand the real impact of AI usage. This accelerated adoption across the organization and currently:
100% of pull requests are AI-assisted
AI is fully embedded in the team’s workflow
What started as a fragmented adoption became a fully aligned system, driven by clear, objective signals.
A system for continuous improvement
Beyond alignment and AI adoption, Pensero introduced a new way for the team to improve over time since performance is tracked and shared:
Engineers can now see their work, understand it in context, and track their own progress week over week.
For some, this even created a sense of self-driven benchmarking “challenge” pushing themselves to improve based on real data.
For managers, it transformed how they guide their teams. Instead of relying on intuition, they can now anchor conversations in evidence and use it to coach more effectively.
Focus as a competitive advantage
For Cubbo, Pensero ultimately provides something critical for a small, high-leverage team:
The ability to stay focused, even as everything around them changes.
It ensures that:
Work stays aligned with strategy
Teams continuously improve
New technologies like AI are adopted with clarity
“It’s the lighthouse of our engineering team.”
In a fast-moving environment where priorities shift constantly, that clarity becomes a competitive advantage. Because for small teams operating at scale, focus is everything.
