Echoes HQ Reviews

In our organisation Echoes is used on on daily basis through Github PR et Jira tickets

We use on a weekly basis the insights provided by the platform on our reporting and to help team to identify potential problem on their day to day.

This tool is really usefull and easy to put in place :

- Easy to adopt for developers with only tag to add to PR or Jira tickets

- Quick insights, very usefull to determine for example the shadow work / maintenance effort done by developers

- Perfect to show where efforts goes to strategic pillars company

- Super easy to setup : very few hours of internal work to have a 100% functionnal tool.

- Last but not least, Echoes team act really like a partner. They are super reactive to answer any questions or solve any problem.

Honestly, It's very difficult to see things I dislike in Echoes.

As for all tool, there is room for continuous improvement and more product surface, as for example different way of calculating the leadtime.

Echoes help us to solve some of the following problems:

- Measuring automatically the efforts put on build and run software engineers activities (this is not a time tracker and this clearly not the purpose here !)

- Measuring the DORA metrics for our squads

- Identify if at a tech departments our efforts is aligned with company strategy

- Spot forgotten open PR through echoes notifications

Easy to set up and integrate with GitHub, Jira, etc. Extremely flexible: customisable to report on axes/dimensions that are actually relevant to your teams. Adds little or no overhead to individual engineers' work. Does not attempt to track code-level metrics or track individual people — this is a good thing! Helpful and responsive team.

Takes some time to get it configured in a way that provides the most value to your teams.

It gives us visibility into how our software teams are truly spending their time (e.g. feature work versus maintenance) and allows teams ownership over correcting that when necessary to meet their targets/desires.

Helps us track our improvements to delivery time, cycle time etc., and also lets engineers flag what is slowing them down (e.g. unclear requirements) so we can improve specific pain points.

Helps us track the true progress towards completing, as well as identifying scope creep.

Gives us a true picture of what each of our streams of work is actually 'costing' us, in terms of full-time employees.