Uplevel

Uplevel provides a patent-pending engineering effectiveness platform that uses machine learning and organizational science to generate insights based on best practices and a superset of developer-specific data. This platform is designed to detect execution risks, manage employees' tasks and time, and ensure that productivity is not negatively impacted due to overworking.

Uplevel selectively collects data from applications such as calendar, messaging, project management, code repositories, and engagement surveys. The company aims to protect users' privacy by securing sensitive information and focusing exclusively on pertinent patterns. The insights are presented visually in a transparent way and guidance is delivered to managers and engineers on a daily basis.

The Uplevel platform aims to assist users with a variety of productivity solutions:

• Reducing context switching and minimizing distractions by learning the impact of meetings and messaging

• Balancing teams' time between collaboration and individual work

• Optimizing calendars to accommodate individual work and demanding problem-solving tasks

• Informing managers which teams may be at risk for burnout
• Evaluating and managing the impact of disruptions
• Calculating estimated outcomes of engineering output
• Balancing workloads by distributing tasks according to deadlines and managing team bandwidth

In response to the worldwide transition of companies and organizations to remote working, Uplevel launched three new features, designed specifically to support teams in effectively leading remote teams with the power of data, coaching, and best practices.

Always On is a feature of the Uplevel platform implemented to help reduce overtime and prevent burnout caused by remote work. This feature identifies always-on behaviors on messaging apps like Slack/Teams, Jira, and calendars, and creates an indexed score based on high-volume activity outside of standard work hours.

The isolation index is measured by employees' attendance in work-related and social meetings and is used to help maintain a stable team connection. Reduced interaction can negatively impact cross-team collaboration and work dependencies. This feature helps teams avoid a drop in collaboration between co-workers, in both mandatory and non-mandatory meetings.

This feature shows signs of infrequent pull requests or reduced project throughput, enabling teams to identify and address factors impacting effectiveness resulting from limitations imposed by remote working conditions.

Uplevel uses its own solution to monitor productivity and employee activity levels. In one case, the company had to respond to an issue affecting a customer whereby key data was inaccurately displayed. Uplevel's engineers devised a solution of improving the feature at the core level in a way that would serve all of the company's customers.

This resulted in a short-notice pivot to a complex task that engaged many cross-team dependencies involving data science, service, presentation layer, and the customer success team. Following this sprint period, Always On alerted Uplevel's management to the highest activity scores, both in value and duration, since the feature had been introduced.

To counteract the sprint's negative impact on the wellbeing of Uplevel employees, the company sent all of its employees on vacation and adjusted the upcoming roadmap schedule to ensure that a comfortable level of output would be required in the near future. In this way, the Always On score served as a tangible reference and potentially helped Uplevel to prevent burnout.

Avalara has approximately 3,000 employees (including nearly 1,000 engineers) working across thirteen international offices, resulting in non-standard working hours. Following a period of significant growth, the company sought tools to improve the management of its engineering department and settled for Uplevel's engineering effectiveness platform.

Since implementation, Uplevel assists Avalara in quantifying and improving engineering effectiveness by providing front-line managers and engineers with insights related to individual work, context switching, and burnout. Marilyn Bond, VP of Engineering Execution Excellence at Avalara, commented:

Before Uplevel, our first-line managers were just driving execution. [With Uplevel] they can drive towards better efficiency, effectiveness, and collaboration because they have the data to make the right decisions.