Span

What do you like best about the product?

Having access to the underlying data catalog

What do you dislike about the product?

I'm not able to set up custom goals for my team

What problems is the product solving and how is that benefiting you?

Consolidation of metrics from disparate tools. I have a centralized view and reduces time to value for analysis

What do you like best about the product?

The product is easy to use and straightforward to navigate. Our contacts are highly responsive, and any issues we report are taken seriously and resolved quickly. The survey platform is also very helpful for our sentiment surveys, and it eliminates many of the manual processes we previously had to handle. Span integrates with all our work tracking software and services and we have never noticed any downtime.

What do you dislike about the product?

The way the platform calculates its metrics can feel a bit too opaque, which sometimes raises questions about accuracy. In addition, the service integrations can be somewhat difficult to configure, and the setup process isn’t always as straightforward as I’d expect.

What problems is the product solving and how is that benefiting you?

Span has helped us track DORA metrics and identify SDLC bottlenecks we can address. It’s also been very useful for monitoring AI usage across our engineering teams and for spotting trends over time.

What do you like best about the product?

As our company's VP of Finance, it's hard for me to know what EXACTLY my engineers and product teams are working on. Through Span, I'm able to tag what projects each individual employee is working on and apply their own respective compensation rate against that project. After aggregrating all of the employees, I can then see I have 8 FTEs working on project X which cost me $Y. I have 11 FTEs working on project B costing me $C. It's a great tool giving me visibility into managing our company's labor resources against our critical projects/goals.

It also helps that the Span team is incredibly responsive. Any feature requests that I have are met with genuine curiousity as to my use case and with a plesant attitude. I love their team.

What do you dislike about the product?

I've only been using the platform for 2 months now, but haven't found anything material that bothers me. As mentioned before, anything that I've wanted, they've addressed for me personally.

What problems is the product solving and how is that benefiting you?

Resource allocation management. It gives me, a finance exec, visibility into what my R&D teams are working on.

What do you like best about the product?

The tool is easy to use, the team is incredibly responsive, and the data we get is invaluable. We use it across our organization to inform allocation, velocity, and performance. Getting it set up was way easier than other tools and the intrgrations we have with JIRA, Github, and Gcal helped to illuminate areas of the company that we didn't have before.

What do you dislike about the product?

When I have something I dislike about Span, I raise it as a product feature. Sometimes they don't do it, sometimes they can and do. But I always know.

What problems is the product solving and how is that benefiting you?

We've been able to understand areas of the organization and how we are progressing. For the first time, we know how we are spending our time with a level of accuracy that we didn't have ever before. AND we can take action to improve it.

What do you like best about the product?

The SPAN team is kind, very collaborative, receptive our our needs and eager to address any concerns. They care about their product and their customers.

Some of things I've come to appreciate about the tool so far include the following :
- Easy and intuitive
- One stop shop for key Jira metrics I care about
-Saving on time previously spent creating queries and dashboards to extract the desired metrics
-Allows leadership to gain insights that can lead to meaningful conversations on ways we can improve our processes and practices
-It has helped provide some light on patterns we had not noticed
-The ability to customize the Teams to suit our needs

What do you dislike about the product?

Nothing meaningful to add here. As a new user, I'm still tinkering with it and continuing to explore it's potential for our team. However, the SPAN team has been very receptive the issues and requests we've raised so far so nothing to add at this time.

What problems is the product solving and how is that benefiting you?

Like the saying goes "if you can't measure it, you can't improve it" . Having visibility to the meaningful metrics will help us determine if have can contribute to faster delivery and quality of our product.

What do you like best about the product?

Span has been very helpful to pinpoint trends and patterns both on individual teams and in the organization at a higher level. The metrics help tell a story and identify bottlenecks

What do you dislike about the product?

Product is still younger, so some workflows are sometimes a bit clunky and hard to digest. Team is very customer centric and always willing to take feedback though!

What problems is the product solving and how is that benefiting you?

- High level overview of what team and organization are working on
- Working norms for team and organization
- Code level metrics for engineers that are hard to get otherwise
- Survey tool

What do you like best about the product?

- Lots of useful metrics, and it's easy to to see comparisons (over time, relative to org, etc)
- Dark mode is incredible and makes me want to use the product more
- The team is responsive, collaborative, and generally cares about user expeirence. Great all around
- Depth of information is really valuable, and there is clear thought into what metrics exist
- The Insights functionalty is super useful, and notification options that go along
- UI is clean across the app. Especially the activity log screen

What do you dislike about the product?

Nothing major! Some additional features I'd love to see in the future:

- Would be great to be able to tweak the definitions for some calculations, or fork off of core metrics to tailor them more. Example - some of the time calculations can be nuanced (meeting time, focus time, etc). The defintions that power these metrics sometimes miss out on how different companies operate, and may over/under capture the actual time (e.g. if an interview is scheduled, but technically has only has 1 "participant", how does that get captured?)
- Would be nice to have more aggegation options. I'd love to have a landing screen dashboard where you can pick the top 3-4 metrics to surface in one rollup dashboard. The Reports Summary is close, but doesn't quite have the customization I need. Even a "favorite" option within each individual metrics tile could feed into an individualized view

What problems is the product solving and how is that benefiting you?

- Developer velocity (helps me identify where we can be more efficient with code output)
- Time management (helps me identify where we can be more efficient with people's time)
- Onboarding progress (helps me analyze how folks are ramping up as a developer)

What do you like best about the product?

Span has been incredibly helpful for ust to get a sense of how are team is working and performing. It allows us to ensure that what we strive for is happening in the day to day lives of our engineering team. Span allows us to get folks on the same page and create consistent vs. point in time visibility.

What do you dislike about the product?

No major dislikes, the team is responsive to feedback and constantly innovating.

What problems is the product solving and how is that benefiting you?

Span helps us see where teams might be spinning, which allows us to dig in and improve process to allow them to move faster. I also find it really helpful for ensuring that when we make changes it doesn't have an adverse effect on productively and throughput of our organization. Its a great signaling tool for us that then drives action.

What do you like best about the product?

Span is giving us insights on delivery, performance, and planning metrics that we never had before in an easy intuitive snappy interface. Also, the setup was relatively straightfoward. The team at Span is fantastic to work with; they are very friendly, incredibly responsive, and are very comitted to build a successful platform.

What do you dislike about the product?

Nothing major really. There are some kinks in the product that the team is still ironing out which is expected from a very new product. There are some heavy drill downs that could time out for example every now and then.

What problems is the product solving and how is that benefiting you?

Span is helping us in a few ways with problems around velocity:
1. insights about inidividual performance.
2. highlight gaps in team-level delivery
3. show investment-level breakdowns

What do you like best about the product?

They have been very supportive in our mission to improve our productivity by giving us insights into time spent coding, team activity, and throughput. As a company they've built trust by staying very close to our team, making product improvements as we've requested them, and the accuracy is very high. I hear zero complaints of the variety - 'this data isn't right' or 'I disagree with what this tells us'. It's been very helpful for getting initial insights to spark team conversation on how to improve how we work.

What do you dislike about the product?

It is a relatively new product so some features we've had to see incremental improvements to in order to use them, but they are very responsive and so it's really not an issue any more!

What problems is the product solving and how is that benefiting you?

Productive time vs meeting time insights, code throughput, developer engagement/community, relative team comparison