We help companies ship faster and align engineering with business goals by providing data-driven insights: CEO & Co-Founder Alex Circei of Waydev said

“We are backed by Y Combinator, the most important technology business accelerator in the world, behind companies like Stripe, Airbnb, Dropbox, and more.”

Waydev is an Engineering Management Intelligence Platform based in San Francisco. Waydev provides visibility into engineering work and helps engineering leaders understand the alignment with business initiatives, and provides insight into the  DORA Metrics and the SPACE Framework metrics.

The Silicon Review reached out to Alex Circei, CEO of Waydev, and here’s what he had to say.

Interview Highlights

Q. What inspired the creation of Waydev? Please brief us about the history so far.

In 2017, I saw a really big problem, and I believed I could fix it. I was an advisor for a company that was struggling with visibility into engineering and needed a way to measure software delivery, identify the bottlenecks in the development process and align the engineering work with the business strategy. The problem was that they did not have a way to gain visibility and a tool to help have insight into engineering work, validate assumptions with data, and improve performance.

Waydev provides data-driven insights to help you ship software faster and align engineering work with business goals. We have been running since 2017, and we help over 300 tech companies across the world. We are backed by Y Combinator, the most important technology business accelerator in the world, behind companies like Stripe, Airbnb, Dropbox, and more.

Waydev provides insights from your engineering stack (GitHub, CircleCI, Jira, etc.) to accelerate software delivery velocity and align with business priorities.

Q. What are your focus areas?

Waydev connects to Git Repositories (GitHub, GitLab, BitBucket), Issue Tracking Systems (Jira, Azure Boards), CI/CD tools (CircleCI, Jenkins, GitHub Actions, etc.) and generates metrics, KPIs, and dashboards that give engineering leaders insight into their teams’ software development processes. Waydev focuses on activity, delivery, throughput, and benchmarking, having a set of metrics, KPIs, and dashboards for each category.

Q. Can you introduce us to your products and solutions? What are their key features?

Waydev offers engineering leaders visibility into their teams’ DORA metrics, cycle time, sprint progress, and project costs, and the ability for leaders to customize their custom dashboards. It does this by connecting to the engineering tool stack (GitHub, CircleCI, Jira, etc.) to accelerate velocity and align with business initiatives.

Q. In what industries are your clients? Can you provide us with one or two success stories describing the challenges your customers faced and how Waydev helped them overcome those challenges?

With the help of Waydev, Fortune 500 companies accomplished -- a 28% faster cycle time, decreased unplanned work by 21%, and a 28% decrease in code churn.

Sovos is a tax and compliance company, and they have been using Waydev for more than a year now. They needed a way to gain visibility and see areas that needed improvement. They uncovered certain systematic issues in terms of their development environment and tooling and started to improve the performance of their teams. After using Waydev for a year, they doubled the productivity of their teams. Read more here.

Nowcom is the leading provider of Internet applications and business solutions for the used car market, and they have been using Waydev for more than three years now. Nowcom chose Waydev as the Git Analytics tool for their engineering leaders because it provides visibility and the ability to increase their engineering activity performance. Waydev gives engineering leaders insight into DORA metrics, cycle time, sprint progress, and project costs, and the ability for leaders to customize their custom dashboards. Before working with Waydev, Nowcom’s managers and executives lacked visibility of what was happening. Their process consisted of weekly meetings meant to establish the agenda for the coming week. After more than three years of using the platform, the engineering leaders at Nowcom understand the progress of their teams and can improve performance. Read more here.

Q. Tell us about the Waydev team. What value do they bring to the company?

At Waydev, we believe in innovation and growth, as well as the power of data. We help companies ship faster and align engineering with business goals by providing data-driven insights.

My greatest achievement as a leader is happily coming to work each day alongside an amazing team. For me, that’s the most rewarding aspect of being a leader at Waydev.

Q. What new endeavors is Waydev currently undertaking?

Our new custom dashboards help engineering leaders build and customize their dashboards to have the most tailored view of your team’s performance. As a VP of Engineering or CTO, you will have multiple dashboards that are fed with data about the processes your teams are working on without requiring any manual input from engineers or managers.

Q. What's the one thing you want Waydev to be known for?

We want everyone to know that Waydev gives you insight by offering multiple dashboards with comprehensive data enabling you to closely follow how the technological vision of the company is being executed. It encompasses the DORA metrics showcasing complex data about your teams’ activity or performance to help you get a clearer picture of how efficient processes are. As a VP of Engineering or CTO, you will have multiple dashboards that are fed with data about the processes your teams are working on without requiring any manual input from engineers or managers.

Tell us, what’s next for Waydev.

We plan on growing even faster, hiring even more amazing and talented people, and making our customers even happier.

Alex Circei, CEO | In His Own Words

I have an academic background in economics, marketing, organizational leadership, and entrepreneurship, and I am a serial entrepreneur who founded and led several other businesses in the past decade.

I started my entrepreneurship back in 2007 by building an IT&C online store called LiveMag.

In 2008, I founded Copimaj. The specific of the agency is proficient in developing online stores and services that specialize in online marketing. We’ve worked with brands such as UNICEF, Gucci, Paul & Shark, Burberry, Prada, and other local market leaders in fashion, child seat products, beauty, and healthcare. I also founded StoreBeez, a marketplace platform that led to a three-month experience at the Birmingham Oxygen Accelerator – an intensive business accelerator for tech startups.

In 2013, I went to Silicon Valley to launch Lupsale, an email marketing platform, at the TechCrunch Disrupt of that year. Later, in 2014, I founded Billme, an invoicing app for freelancers.

In 2017, I saw a really big problem, and I believed I could focus on and fix it. I was an advisor to a company that was struggling with not having visibility into engineering and needed a way to measure software delivery, identify the bottlenecks in the development process, and align the engineering work with the business strategy. The problem was not having visibility and a tool to help have insight into engineering work, validate assumptions with data, and help improve performance. This is how Waydev started.

“We want everyone to know that Waydev gives you insight by offering multiple dashboards with comprehensive data enabling you to closely follow how the technological vision of the company is being executed.”