NapAnt Story: Visualize the Productivity of your Engineering Team
Our company started from a small nest — university dormitory — where the founders Sunao Tateno (CEO) and Kengo Shikama (CTO) met and discussed all night about the future of society, specifically computer science. The pair identified the issue of information overload among researchers who were greeted with thousands of scientific papers including preprints appearing each day without a means of filtering, sharing or discussing relevant papers within their discipline.
To solve the problem, the pair created Onikle where researchers share paper libraries with URLs to reduce the time spent on searching by simply referring to what other researchers are reading. The platform also utilizes original NLP AI to analyze the behaviors of users in order to recommend the most relevant papers.
In the process of making the service the engineering team had an issue of efficiently managing projects. From the project manager’s point of view, he was not able to pursue how projects were completed and therefore did not understand how to increase productivity of engineers. As a Project Manager, you want to know what each person is working on in real time, which part is taking time, or whether it ended early to better management.
We started to introduce several methods to measure the productivity of engineers. At first the service called Trello — virtual post it board — every time someone added a task or marked it as complete, it notified the whole team. This nuisance caused the team to turn off the notification and as time went by people stopped using it. We hypothesized that opening a new app each time to report on progress is a bit tedious, so we directly started to report our daily progress using the work communication tool — Slack. But, in a few weeks time, people stopped posting their daily progress and it became weekly. And again, in a short time people stopped posting their weekly updates too.
We concluded that engineers failed to report to their manager through manual input methods as it becomes a severe burden for them due to the difficulty of their job. Think about it, ants are not always carrying treats to nest but before carrying they need to search for it. Just like ants, engineers need to research to implement, which is a difficult phase to share updates of its progress.
Project Manager realized that 80% of his work was setting objectives for sprints, allocating tasks, scheduling, and managing progress. The task completion rate by the engineer team was about 70% and the lack of understanding created down time. To solve this issue, the CTO decided to automate the process of evaluating the productivity of engineers.
CTO introduced a slack bot which retrieves logs of commits, pull-requests, and merges from Github repositories, and reports to slack per organization and per developer. The notification does not only show the numerical value but also the name of the commit. By implementing the slack bot, Project Manager’s work was reduced by 60% and could spend more time on different tasks. Also, the completion rate of sprints increased to 90%. The efficiency of the team has been significantly improved by introducing and automating tools.
Simultaneously, we have come to realize that the preprint industry is not matured enough and the pain we hypothesized is not universally shared among researchers. At this moment we started to think about pivoting to different services. Through interviews conducted on various companies, there was a common issue of measuring productivity of engineers. Measuring the productivity of engineers is essential for performance review and also planning, an integral part of any company but companies with engineers had hard time evaluating such. We have realized our internal tool hacked together out of necessity can be useful for other companies.
The solution for automating the process of evaluating the productivity of engineers is non-existent or at best very costly. Our mission is visualizing productivity to empower developers by providing cost-effective methods of automating the evaluation process. We believe the tool we developed in our nest will help others’ nest. Ants are known for their hard work; we humans aspire to it, but we came to a point of evolution where we need to work smart, not hard. This is where NapAnt comes in and brings you the sugar.
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