TrueLayer is a global open banking platform for building financial experiences founded in 2016 and raised over $270M. Businesses of every size, from startups to large enterprises, use TrueLayer to power their payments, access financial insights, and onboard customers across Europe, the UK, and Australia.
TrueLayer went from 10 to 150 engineers in 3,5 years. Quickly they saw the need to have an Engineering Operations (EngOps) team who could focus on improving how the organization operated. And so they did it. The team started measuring some parameters like the number of deploys, but it wasn't enough.
Soon they realized those metrics were not actionable. Whilst the org continued to grow, they couldn't break it down by teams, or have deep visibility into different processes. Likewise, the team could not showcase the impact they were surely having on the business with only qualitative data. They needed a way to quantify the effect of their work.
"The number of developers was growing fast, but the productivity curve was not following the same trend. We knew how to investigate further, but we lacked the tools to do so." Luca Palmieri, Principal Engineer
What TrueLayer did know was that they needed a solution to get more visibility into their process.
The company chose Athenian for its ease of use, the capability to drill down into the teams, and the fine-grained metrics available in the product.
With Athenian, TrueLayer got the clarity they were looking for and managed to identify and prioritize issues that needed to be fixed in the delivery pipeline.
“As your engineering org scales you might have a hunch that something could be better, but you simply cannot know everything and must find a way to quantify it in a reliable manner. Athenian gave us the visibility we needed to easily identify bottlenecks and prioritize their resolution” Luca Palmieri, Principal Engineer
As for the EngOps team, they could finally measure the impact their work had and quantify the value they bring to the rest of the organization.
Another positive consequence was that Athenian helped the whole company get more visibility. Engineering Managers are now able to drill down into their teams and understand what exactly they are delivering, how they can improve, and the impact they have on the whole organization. And Senior Engineering Managers are now able to keep on top of delivery trends across the different teams that report to them.
After 4 months of using Athenian, TrueLayer made notable improvements such as:
