The Challenge: Delivering the right impact early on
Fractional CTOs play a crucial role in guiding growing companies by providing strategic technical leadership, optimizing processes, and aligning engineering efforts with business goals. As they are new to the companies they support, they need to quickly understand the state of the engineering organization and identify the biggest bottlenecks in productivity to address.
For Allison McMillan, fractional CTO and previous Director of Engineering at Github, getting a data-driven view of the organization was a requirement.
“As a fractional executive, I need to quickly pinpoint areas of concern in an engineering organization. Having metrics that understand both quantitative and qualitative inputs is critical to identifying both a baseline, and month over month changes. Other tools I tried rely solely on qualitative data not taking into account developer sentiment, which is a primary driver for team success and high performance.”
The Solution: Data-driven, actionable insights with Quotient
Seeking a way to clearly understand the organization and their bottlenecks, Allison started using Quotient. Within a week of implementing it at her client company (a Series C, B2B startup), the engineering organization had a clear view of the health of their engineering org and the top bottlenecks to address.
Quotient enabled Allison to:
- Quickly understand the engineering organization’s strengths and growth opportunities.
- Prioritize high-impact projects based on data, not gut feel.
- Implement recommended actions on a team level, and measure change over time.
- Identify and resolve bottlenecks early before they became costly delays.
“Quotient helped me identify gaps by looking at engineering as a whole using multi-month trendlines to identify what was consistently trending upwards or downwards. On the team level, I can dig in with managers to understand the best solutions for issues surfaced on their teams so we could make iterative improvements. I use Quotient to touch base on the areas that seemed most concerning to that team so I can support them better.”
The Results: Faster time-to-impact, and improved engineering productivity
In the 12 months since adopting Quotient, Allison has achieved numerous measurable improvements across key engineering metrics:
- 33% increase in code quality
- 29% reduction in impact of technical debt
- 38% improvement in stability of requirements
- 7% increase in engineering job satisfaction
After seeing success with her first company, Allison now relies on Quotient across multiple engineering organizations.
“Quotient provides me and my team with a treasure trove of data and information that is valuable and useful in so many different ways.”
Conclusion: Why engineering leaders choose Quotient
For fast-scaling engineering teams, visibility and alignment are critical. Quotient gives engineering leaders the clarity they need to drive immediate and lasting change. By turning complex engineering data into actionable insights, teams can optimize processes, improve developer experience, and achieve more impact without months of guesswork.
See how Quotient can help your team. Request a demo today.
