Lightspeed partnered with Pluralsight Flow to transform their engineering team
The key benefits of Pluralsight Flow for Lightspeed
Time to merge decreased by 93.2%
** The number of hours between when a PR is created and when it is merged.
Improving time to merge results in a decrease in delayed releases.
Cycle time improved by 43%
** The time period from when a ticket enters active status and reaches the final Done status in its life cycle.
When work is well-planned, unchanged, completed in small iterations, and reviewed in a timely manner, the time to deliver an idea to your customers will be low.
Commits per day increased by 53.8%
** Commits per day are the average number of commits made on coding days.
Smaller, more frequent commits maintain good code quality and keep PR reviews easy to understand for reviewers.
The Challenge
The Lightspeed business has experienced incredible amounts of change in the last three years.
This resilient team has experienced immense change:
- Exponential growth: tripling their engineering team in just three years
- Going remote during the pandemic, and staying as a remote-first team
- Being spun out from a parent company (CDK Global) to their own standalone business entity
While growth is generally a great thing for a business, growth can be incredibly taxing on processes, morale, and efficiency.
In short, for Lightspeed it has not been business as usual, and Lightspeed engineering leadership has needed to undergo a complete engineering transformation to meet the needs of their business and establish operational norms that facilitate sustainable scalability within their engineering teams.
To meet these business demands placed on their engineering team, Lightspeed’s leadership needed to increase the visibility, efficiency, and predictability of their engineering team to enable them to stay effective and nimble throughout this period of immense change.
Who they are
As a leader in cloud-based Dealership Management Solutions uniquely developed for the Powersports, Marine, RV, Trailer, Outdoor Power Equipment, and Golf Car industries, Lightspeed helps optimize end-to-end business operations, including sales, parts, service, rental, accounting, and CRM. When used in daily operations, Lightspeed DMS helps dealers sell more units, service, and parts, while creating a better customer experience.
Lightspeed helps dealers increase their profitability by selling more units, service, and parts, all while creating a more streamlined experience for customers. For nearly 40 years, Lightspeed has been empowering 3,600+ dealers across North America with the tools and technology they need to manage their dealerships.
To learn more, visit www.lightspeeddms.com
“I've been able to show the leadership team exactly how the development team is doing and that has allowed them to have implicit trust in me as a leader to make decisions that affect the team and the company.”
Jaimie Caldwell, Senior Software Delivery Engineering Manager
The Solution
Visibility
Flow enabled the Lightspeed team to increase their visibility into their engineering team’s work and processes. Visibility has completely transformed the way that Lightspeed conducts their 1:1’s with their team members. Bringing objective data to every 1:1 has enabled the leadership team to ensure data is freely available to every member of their team and helped them to ensure everyone is on board and pulling in the same direction.
Efficiency
After turning the lights on, it became much clearer to the Lightspeed team what levers they need to pull to improve their team’s efficiency. They identified that their review process had inefficiencies and as a result, their cycle time took longer than they’d like and they set to work on improving it.
Highlighting their team performance in 1:1’s and other typical day-to-day ceremonies helped the Lightspeed team to use these metrics as signals to help them stay focused on their north-star of consistently delivering innovative features and solutions to their customers.