The people who don’t think they need Allstacks.

We’ve spoken to 1000+ engineering and product leaders from startups to large enterprises and while their products, industries, team structure, size, process, and methodologies may vary, they are fundamentally trying to do the same thing — improve the way they build software. 

dog in unicorn outfit

 

Through all those calls and demos, we’ve seen some trends emerge in the objections that come up. We want to squash your concerns before you have them so read on to learn the most common objections — or objectors we’ve met. 

📊 The Already Informed

Actual Quotes: 

  • “I can get this information from my [fill in the blank] tool.” 
  • “I manage this in spreadsheets (or via a BI tool/analysts) and it seems to work fine”
  • “Can’t I get all of what you’re talking about in JIRA / Github?”

The perception is that you already have access to this data either in your issue management system, a spreadsheet, or a BI tool. You might even have a team of analysts on the task. 

While you probably have some of the data, your existing reports only help you understand what you already need to know. It's an incomplete picture that causes you to react to engineering outputs rather than control business outcomes. Allstacks shows you the information you didn't know you needed to understand through more thoughtful use of your existing data and machine learning.  With a complete view into software delivery, you get context and intelligence about how you ship software, proactive alerts when something is awry, and insights into what levers you need to adjust to hit your delivery dates.

This value can be seen in our Forecasting, Portfolio Report, and Milestone Reports — take the tour here.

🦄 The Agile Unicorn

Actual Quotes: 

  • “We don’t really do deadlines / firm dates… we’re AGILE.” 
  • “We aren’t doing Agile or use Jira like everyone else.” 
  • “All of our teams are autonomous and work differently.”

Agile helps you understand how you are going to deliver work but not what work will be delivered. Allstacks helps you connect your Agile methodology in context to the business outcomes. We provide you with progress, trends, and predictability to help operationalize agile and give your product stakeholders gain confidence in your ability to deliver without introducing deadlines.

Not to mention, how many different flavors of agile have you seen in the wild? Probably a lot. One size does not fit all when it comes to process or team structure and we accounted for that when building Allstacks. No matter what tools, process, team structure, or methodology, our algorithms account for this so you don’t have to change how you work. 

⌚️The Short On Time

Actual Quotes: 

  • “What does it look like to get started? I’m busy and don’t want to do a lot of coordination or training…”
  • “I’m so busy, I’m worried about having to change my process just to make Allstacks useful”

We agree. Time is precious. This is why your manual reporting efforts and ceremonies are not a good use of your resources. We want to be the best part of your day, not the part you dread. We achieve that by providing valuable insights that will impact your ability to plan and ship software with precision while making it painless (read: automated) to get to that value. That means zero configuration or process change. 

Getting Started with a free Proof of Concept:

  • Connect your tools (see all integrations)
  • Allstacks processes your historical team activity from those tools without any change in your process or setup.
  • We work with you to understand the data and incorporate it into your team’s existing workflow or ceremonies.

The data you get from Allstacks will immediately give you insight on where to start improving software delivery by showing you when your strategic initiatives will be completed and where your bottlenecks are.

🤔 The Misinformed

Actual Quotes: 

  • “Wait, I’m confused. Is this a dev tool?” 
  • “I don’t think I’m the right person.”

We aren’t another dev tool in your stack. You’ve got plenty of those. Allstacks is an intelligence platform to align your product and engineering teams to business outcomes by using the data from your dev tools. We take the data from your entire software lifecycle and show you how to remove the risk to make sure you deliver on time for your customers.

We also surface insights and metrics needed for engineering managers, team leads, and agile leaders to target their teams or areas of responsibility that impact the team’s overall ability to deliver software. 

💸 The Negotiator

Actual Quote: "I’m not sure how this will fit amongst our dev tools budget.”

Allstacks isn't a developer tool. It's a platform to align your business. While your code repos and issue tracking systems help you do your job, Allstacks helps teams and organizations do their job better, more consistently. We give you control over your outcomes and help other stakeholders better plan around your delivery targets and goals. It doesn't just help you reduce bugs. It helps you prevent significant business and customer delays. 

Pricing: We are pretty transparent on pricing. While there are a lot of factors that we will work with you on, most of our contracts work out to be about $400 data contributor per year. Data Contributors are considered anyone on your product and/or engineering org that Allstacks would be analyzing data on from your integrations.

🤔 The Data Doubter

Actual Quotes:

  • “I know our process is choppy and inconsistent… won’t we have a garbage in, garbage out problem?”
  • Actual Quote: “Our team is new; we won’t have the historical data.”

Allstacks can be incredibly helpful in helping teams drive tool and process adoption. Data doesn’t lie. It will show the areas you need to focus on and how it impacts your ability to deliver. Because we don’t require and process changes of your team, you’re able to have the honest truth of how you’re using your tools reflected in our platform, and the problematic areas stick out very clearly. For instance, teams struggling to estimate their stories will commonly use our Work in Progress report to drive estimation best practices. 

We only need 45-60 days of data to receive the full suite of alerts and reports, and half of our alerts are available with only 1-2 sprints worth of data. Many of our customers use us as part of the foundation to create a baseline for new teams and transformations. 

🕵🏽‍♀️ The Anti-Big Brother 

Actual Quotes:

  • “Feels like big brother.”
  • “We don’t want to stack rank our developers.”

We do not take this lightly. We spend a lot of time thinking about and building ways to NOT be big brother. There are products out there that focus on “impact scores” or “rankings” of your teams. We want you to know that the spirit of what we’ve built is more like “a rising tide lifts all boats” than “you’re only as good as your weakest link”. Allstacks is focused on providing insights into building predictable, reliable, and consistent teams. You’ll never see a stack rank, grades, scores, etc., in Allstacks because we think that’s wholly missing the point. We find when you unveil Allstacks to your entire engineering team, they see our focus is on making the team and software organization more likely to hit milestones and remove the risk of failure. There’s an “everyone’s in this together” vibe we’re trying to convey.

Ultimately, Allstacks is a tool that creates alignment amongst stakeholders. Once the data is in place, everyone can easily understand how and where to focus their efforts to mitigate risks to improve customer value.

👾The Gamer 

Actual Quote: “Won’t my team just game the metrics?”

Developers are really good at gaming metrics. Due to the nature of how we bring together your data from your SDLC, correlating multiple data points ensures the metrics work with each other and balance with each other. Gaming only one will negatively impact the others. Gaming all of them elicits the right behaviors towards progress. So game away, it’s actually ideal :) 

Now that’s out of the way, should we get started? 

If you identify with any of the above, we would love the opportunity to show you how Allstacks will transform your product and engineering teams. Let’s chat

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