How Top Engineering Teams Use Software Engineering Insights to Drive Measurable Business Impact

Visibility Isn’t Enough, You Need Insights

Engineering organizations today don’t lack data—they lack clarity. Delivery timelines, developer activity, and code quality metrics are scattered across systems, making it hard to answer simple but critical questions: Where are we losing time? Are we investing in the right work? Who needs support or coaching?

This is where Harness Software Engineering Insights (SEI) steps in. Unlike traditional dashboards, SEI offers opinionated, role-based insights that connect engineering execution with business value.

In this post, we’ll walk through a proven rollout framework, real customer success stories, and a practical guide for any organization looking to implement an engineering metrics program (EMP) that actually drives impact.

Step 1: Start With Purpose—Define Objectives That Matter

Rolling out SEI without a clear objective is like configuring CI/CD pipelines without deployment goals. Before diving into dashboards or metrics, align internally on what you’re trying to improve.

Most organizations fall into one or more of the following categories:

• Efficiency: Speed up software delivery and reduce cycle time.
  
  
• Productivity: Boost developer engagement and output consistency.
  
  
• Alignment: Ensure engineering effort maps to strategic priorities, like building new features vs. maintaining legacy systems.

💡 A powerful first step is simply asking: What are the top 3 decisions you wish you could make with data but currently can't?

Step 2: Choose the Right Engineering Metrics to Track

Once your objectives are clear, it’s time to define the key performance indicators (KPIs) that reflect progress. At Harness, we recommend starting with 5 core metrics that align with your goals:

• DORA Metrics: Lead Time for Change, Change Failure Rate (CFR), Deployment Frequency, MTTR.
  
  
• Pull Request Cycle Time: Time from PR creation to merge—an essential signal of workflow health.
  
  
• Commit-to-Done Ratio & Scope Creep: Help measure sprint execution quality.
  
  
• Effort Allocation (Business Alignment): Understand time spent on KTLO vs. innovation.
  
  
• Trellis Score & Coding Days: Surface team and individual developer engagement patterns.

These metrics aren’t just about numbers—they tell a story. And SEI’s pre-built dashboards help visualize that story from day one.

Step 3: Configure SEI for Meaningful Insights

Out-of-the-box data isn’t enough—you need context. SEI allows deep configuration across integrations, people, and workflows to ensure accuracy and actionability.

Integrate the Right Systems

Start with the essentials: Jira or ADO (issue tracking), GitHub or Bitbucket (SCM), Jenkins or Harness CI (build/deploy). Validate data ingestion and set up monitoring for failed syncs.

Set Up Contributor Attributes

Merge developer identities across systems and tag them with meaningful metadata: Role, Team, Location, Manager, and Employee Type (FTE, contractor). This enables advanced filtering, benchmarking, and team-level coaching.

Create Focused Collections

Use Asset-Based Collections for things like repositories or services (ideal for DORA/Sprint metrics) and People-Based Collections for teams, departments, or geographies (perfect for Dev Insights, Trellis, and Business Alignment).

Define Profiles & Widgets

SEI lets you build custom profiles for DORA metrics, Business Alignment, and Trellis. These profiles allow you to set your own definitions for “Lead Time,” “MTTR,” or what constitutes “New Work.” Configurable widgets ensure the insights match your team’s workflows—not the other way around.

Step 4: Align Metrics to Roles & Personas

One of SEI’s most valuable capabilities is persona-based reporting. Not every stakeholder needs to see every metric. Instead, create tailored views based on what matters to them.

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By aligning metrics to what stakeholders actually care about, you reduce dashboard fatigue and increase engagement.

Step 5: Build a Rhythm of Review & Ownership

Rolling out dashboards isn’t enough—you need cadence and accountability.

Successful SEI customers establish regular reviews, such as:

• Weekly Ops Syncs: Review PR trends, coding days, scope creep.
  
  
• Monthly Product/Engineering Syncs: Review business alignment and new work %.
  
  
• Quarterly QBRs: Revisit OKRs, refine metrics, show trend improvements.

Each dashboard or collection should have an owner, responsible for interpreting and acting on the insights.

Step 6: Scale with Persona-Based Metrics

Once the foundation is in place, go deeper. SEI allows you to scale insight delivery across the org by:

• Creating role-specific dashboards (e.g., VP of Engineering vs. Scrum Master)
  
  
• Using Trellis to coach teams and surface hidden top performers
  
  
• Integrating with HR systems to layer in context like tenure, geography, or team churn

This is how SEI becomes more than a dashboard—it becomes your engineering operating system.

Step 7: Set Strategic, Measurable Engineering OKRs

Data without goals is directionless. Use SEI to establish stretch goals tied to organizational outcomes.

Here are common SEI-aligned OKRs:

• 📉 Reduce PR Cycle Time by 25%
  
  
• 🧠 Improve Coding Days per Developer to 3.5+/week
  
  
• ⚖️ Increase Innovation Work (New Features) to 60% of total effort
  
  
• 🔧 Decrease Change Failure Rate (CFR) to under 10%

Because SEI continuously measures these metrics, you can track OKR progress in real time.

Real-World Examples: How Leading Companies Use SEI

Cybersecurity: Driving Innovation While Improving Quality

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🧭 Objective:
Improve engineering velocity without compromising security or code quality, while ensuring more effort is spent on new feature development.

📈 Key Results:

• Increased New Work allocation to 62.6% of total engineering effort
  
  
• Reduced Unapproved Pull Requests by 32%, decreasing potential backlog risk
  
  
• Cut PR Cycle Time from 10.4 days to 6.6 days (36% improvement)

💥 Impact:
By using SEI’s Dev Insights and Business Alignment dashboards, the customer was able to shift engineering focus toward innovation. Unapproved PR backlog reductions improved code review discipline, while faster PR cycle times helped the team deliver secure, high-quality features faster.

Information Technology: Scaling Delivery Velocity Without Sacrificing Stability

🧭 Objective:
Accelerate delivery cadence, reduce lead times, and establish a baseline for operational resilience across distributed teams.

📈 Key Results:

• PR Cycle Time dropped from 2.9 days to 47.1 minutes (98.9% reduction)
  
  
• Deployment Frequency increased from 1.09/day to 33.91/day
  
  
• Lead Time for Change reduced from 9.3 months to 2.8 months

💥 Impact:
SEI enabled visibility into every stage of the SDLC — from PRs to production. Dashboards helped engineering leadership identify workflow bottlenecks, while improved cycle time allowed the team to launch features continuously. The organization was also able to define new goals around MTTR reduction for future sprints.

Financial Services: Balancing Risk and Speed During Transformation

🧭 Objective:
Improve release predictability, reduce change failure rates, and maintain quality during large-scale technology transformations.

📈 Key Results:

• Lead Time reduced by 78% (from 1.3 months to 9.4 days)
  
  
• Change Failure Rate (CFR) dropped from 39.9% to 14.4%
  
  
• PR Merge Time decreased from 22 hours to 6.4 minutes (98% faster)

💥 Impact:
Using SEI’s DORA and Sprint Insights dashboards, engineering teams surfaced high-risk areas and improved review discipline. Leadership used Business Alignment reports to visualize time allocation, allowing them to rebalance priorities between legacy maintenance and innovation initiatives — critical for de-risking digital transformation.

Hospitality: Optimizing Hybrid Teams and Engineering Workflows

🧭 Objective:
Improve collaboration and execution within hybrid teams (FTEs and contractors), while accelerating delivery with fewer blockers.

📈 Key Results:

• PR Approval Time dropped from 10.9 to 8.2 days
  
  
• Average Coding Days per Week sustained at 4.2 days, exceeding industry average
  
  
• Contributor collaboration scores highlighted imbalances between contractor and FTE output

💥 Impact:
SEI helped the customer restructure their hybrid engineering model by revealing top contributors, low-collaboration patterns, and team-specific bottlenecks. By tagging contributors by type, team, and location, the organization realigned review ownership and improved handoff speed across distributed groups.

Gaming: Enhancing Stability and Predictability in Feature Delivery

🧭 Objective:
Reduce production risk while accelerating feature releases in a highly agile environment.

📈 Key Results:

• Change Failure Rate improved by 83% (from 23.7% to 3.9%)
  
  
• Lead Time dropped from 2 months to 18.7 days
  
  
• Unapproved PRs decreased by 60%, improving review throughput

💥 Impact:
SEI’s DORA metrics helped the team move from reactive issue management to proactive release planning. With improved scope hygiene and PR discipline, the organization was able to deliver features at a faster pace while maintaining platform stability — a crucial balance in gaming environments where user experience is paramount.

API Security: Accelerating High-Throughput Development with Balance

🧭 Objective:
Speed up secure development without compromising engineering discipline or quality during rapid team expansion.

📈 Key Results:

• PR Lead Time reduced by 95.7% (from 3.2 months to 4.1 days)
  
  
• Coding Days increased from 0.4 to 4.9 days/week (10x improvement)
  
  
• Deployment Frequency scaled to 95.79/day, enabling near-continuous delivery

💥 Impact:
The customer used SEI to quantify the tradeoff between speed and review quality. By highlighting areas with excessive unapproved PRs and scope creep, the team set up opinionated OKRs to strike a balance between velocity and sustainability. Trellis and Dev Insights dashboards were used to coach developers and improve overall workflow consistency.

Further Resources

• Persona-Based Metrics Guide
• Metrics That Matter Podcast

Build an Insight-Driven Engineering Culture

The most successful engineering organizations don’t just collect metrics—they operationalize them. Harness SEI enables your teams to go beyond dashboards and build a culture of insight, accountability, and impact.

By following a structured rollout, aligning metrics to personas, and setting outcome-focused OKRs, SEI can become the backbone of your engineering excellence strategy.

About the Author

Adeeb Valiulla leads the Quality Assurance & Resilience, Cost & Productivity function at Harness, where he works closely with Fortune 500 customers to drive engineering efficiency, improve developer experience, and align software delivery efforts with business outcomes. With a focus on measurable insights, Adeeb helps organizations turn engineering data into actionable intelligence that fuels continuous improvement. He brings a unique blend of technical depth and strategic vision, helping teams unlock their full potential through data-driven transformation.