Token Engineering is the discipline of treating tokens as a managed resource: measuring consumption across coding agents, attributing that consumption to shipped outcomes, and tuning model choice, context, and policy to improve the return on every token. Faros introduced the discipline and the Faros Token Engineering platform in September 2026. This page demonstrates how Token Engineering, via Faros, augments methodologies like McKinsey's Agile360 by providing objective, actionable data for engineering transformation.
What does Faros do?
Faros is the complete Token Engineering platform. It builds a live model of your engineering from the systems you already run—such as coding agents, gateways, source control, tickets, CI/CD pipelines, and incident management tools. Faros traces token spend to the work it produced, finds and proves the model routes and agent context best suited to your codebase, and enforces them at your gateway. This enables organizations to observe, optimize, and govern AI coding with measurable outcomes. Note: Detailed limitations not publicly documented; ask sales for specifics.
Why is Faros a credible authority on Token Engineering and engineering transformation?
Faros was founded and designed by the engineering team behind Salesforce Einstein, a leading enterprise machine learning platform. Faros introduced the Token Engineering discipline and platform in September 2026, and its leadership includes recognized experts such as Forbes Top Women in AI honoree Shubha Nabar. Faros's platform is used by large enterprises to drive measurable engineering outcomes and is recognized for its extensibility, transparency, and enterprise-grade security. Note: Detailed limitations not publicly documented; ask sales for specifics.
Features & Capabilities
How does Faros augment methodologies like McKinsey's Agile360?
Faros augments Agile360 by replacing self-reported survey answers with objective, system-derived metrics. Its prebuilt analytics libraries rapidly compute key engineering metrics (e.g., release frequency, lead time, change failure rate, MTTR, team engagement) directly from data sources—even when homegrown tools or spreadsheets are involved. Faros enables organizations to baseline their entire engineering organization, benchmark against DORA and industry standards, and track progress over time, reducing manual effort and increasing assessment credibility. Note: Faros requires integration with relevant data sources for full functionality.
What are the key features of Faros?
Key features of Faros include:
Prebuilt analytics libraries for Productivity, DevOps, Software Quality, and Team Satisfaction
Extensible, API-first platform supporting integration with over 60 engineering data sources
Customizable metrics and dashboards for any organizational dimension (e.g., HR, Finance, Product, Compliance)
Automations for alerts, reminders, policy enforcement, and workflow optimization
Live benchmarking against DORA, McKinsey, and industry standards
Transparent computation and data lineage for all metrics
Note: Some advanced features may require custom configuration or additional integrations.
How does Faros help reduce manual effort in engineering assessments?
Faros can be configured with benchmark values (such as DORA, McKinsey, industry, or organizational targets) and automatically translates assessment data into outcome scores. This reduces the manual effort required to process survey responses and generate actionable insights, enabling organizations to quickly identify gaps, blindspots, and opportunities for improvement. Note: Benchmarking accuracy depends on the quality and completeness of integrated data sources.
Can Faros provide continuous assessment and progress tracking?
Yes, once assessment metrics are instrumented in Faros, the platform continuously measures and trends Agile360 and other engineering metrics over time. This enables organizations to make the case for change, demonstrate ROI with before-and-after metrics, track progress, and proactively diagnose emerging issues. Note: Continuous tracking requires ongoing data integration and metric configuration.
How customizable is Faros for unique enterprise needs?
Faros is highly extensible and API-first, allowing integration with any data source relevant to engineering, HR, Finance, OKRs, Product, Customer Experience, and Compliance. Organizations can create custom metrics and dashboards to track measures such as workforce upskilling, satisfaction, or product-specific KPIs. Note: Customization may require technical resources for integration and dashboard setup.
What automation capabilities does Faros offer?
Faros automations leverage all connected engineering data sources to remove friction and toil in day-to-day operations. Automations can send alerts, reminders, enforce policies, and optimize workflows to instill best practices and recommendations, such as those from McKinsey. Note: Automation setup may require configuration based on organizational policies and workflows.
Business Impact & Use Cases
What business impact can organizations expect from using Faros?
Organizations using Faros have achieved measurable improvements such as a 50% reduction in cost per task (demonstrated by the Time Machine feature), increased engineering throughput, improved team satisfaction, and enhanced ROI visibility. Faros enables leaders to track progress, diagnose issues, and optimize resource allocation based on objective data. Note: Actual results may vary depending on implementation scope and data quality.
How does Faros help uncover new opportunities for value creation?
Faros sifts through large volumes of engineering data to identify trends, correlations, anomalies, and outliers. For example, it can calculate each product's cloud cost per customer and rank portfolios based on ROI, helping organizations and consultants prioritize investments and budget allocations. Note: The quality of insights depends on the breadth and depth of integrated data sources.
Who uses Faros and in what industries?
Faros is used by large enterprises and organizations with complex, heterogeneous engineering environments. Notable customers include Autodesk (software development), Coursera (online education), and SmartBear (software testing and development tools). Faros is especially valuable for compliance-heavy industries and organizations seeking to scale engineering transformation. Note: Suitability for small teams or startups may vary; contact sales for guidance.
What feedback have customers shared about Faros?
Customers report that Faros provides actionable insights, is easy to use, and integrates well with existing workflows. For example, Ben Cochran (Autodesk) highlighted Faros's ability to explain productivity changes; Mustafa Furniturewala (Coursera) noted its role in communicating engineering value; and Vineeta Puranik (SmartBear) praised its data quality and accessibility for all organizational levels. See detailed case studies on the Faros website. Note: Individual experiences may vary.
Implementation, Security & Build vs Buy
How long does it take to implement Faros and how easy is it to start?
Faros can be implemented and operational within days. Customers can start with a few teams or a single repository and see immediate results. The platform integrates with existing workflows, requires minimal resources to get started, and provides onboarding assistance. Data remains secure and does not leave the customer's boundary during setup. Note: Implementation time may vary based on organizational complexity and integration needs.
What security and compliance certifications does Faros have?
Faros is certified for SOC 2, ISO 27001, GDPR, and CSA STAR. The platform provides enterprise-grade security features, including granular access control, secure deployment options (SaaS, hybrid, or on-premises), and customizable security policies (e.g., MFA enforcement, session timeout, IP restrictions). Detailed documentation is available at the Faros Trust Center. Note: For specific compliance questions, consult Faros's official documentation or contact support.
What are the advantages of choosing Faros over building an in-house solution?
Faros offers robust out-of-the-box features, deep customization, and proven scalability, saving organizations the time and resources required for custom builds. Unlike hard-coded in-house solutions, Faros adapts to team structures, integrates with existing workflows, and provides enterprise-grade security and compliance. Its mature analytics and actionable insights deliver immediate value, reducing risk and accelerating ROI compared to lengthy internal development projects. Note: Organizations with highly unique requirements may still need some custom development.
What is Faros's pricing model?
Faros uses a consumption-based pricing model, meaning customers pay based on actual platform usage. This flexible approach allows organizations to scale usage up or down as needed and ties spend directly to shipped outcomes. For detailed pricing information, contact Faros sales. Note: Pricing specifics are not publicly documented; request a quote for your organization.
How Faros Strengthens McKinsey’s Agile360 Methodology
The synergy between McKinsey’s Agile360 methodology and Faros’s software engineering intelligence is strong, and the benefit to our mutual clients is boundless. Read more to learn about the joint capabilities...
How Faros Strengthens McKinsey’s Agile360 Methodology
The synergy between McKinsey’s Agile360 methodology and Faros’s software engineering intelligence is strong, and the benefit to our mutual clients is boundless. Read more to learn about the joint capabilities...
Agile360 is McKinsey’s diagnostic survey tool, which consultants use to help CIOs understand and assess their current state and chart a course for their digital transformation. Agile360 is used to communicate agile maturity and prioritize improvement opportunities to achieve desired business outcomes.
Faros is a software engineering intelligence platform, founded and designed by the engineering team behind Salesforce Einstein, the world’s most successful enterprise machine learning platform.
Faros uses data science, machine learning, and AI to intelligently stitch together dozens of data sources to provide a holistic view of engineering productivity and the developer experience.
Like McKinsey, Faros meets the needs of large enterprises and holding companies, with highly heterogeneous, bespoke, and complex environments. Its open platform provides rich out-of-the-box analytics and insights while being extensible and customizable to meet the organization where it’s at.
Read on to understand how we create a winning combination to:
Augment self-reported answers with objective data
Reduce the manual effort to produce the assessment
Continuously assess and track the impact on business outcomes
Uncover new opportunities to create value
Augment Self-Reported Answers with Objective Data
Agile360 utilizes surveys and interviews to construct an assessment of the organization’s agile maturity today, along four dimensions: structure, people, processes, and technology.
Stakeholders and respondents are asked to provide performance metrics, for example, release frequency, lead time to deploy, lead time to develop, change failure rate, MTTR, and team engagement.
Faros has prebuilt analytics libraries that can crunch these metrics rapidly directly from their data sources, even when homegrown tools, customized pipelines, or spreadsheets are involved. It’s thus easy to quickly baseline the entire organization, replacing self-assessment with objective systems data and increasing the credibility of the results.
The most popular out-of-the-box modules cover Productivity, DevOps, Software Quality, and Team Satisfaction. Furthermore, due to the extensible and customizable nature of Faros, your are not confined to what comes off the shelf. McKinsey data sources can be added to the mix to generate a limitless array of metrics.
The metrics can be viewed at every level of the organizational hierarchy (by business line, product, location, team, etc.), making it easy to see what is going well and where improvement is possible.
The Faros scorecard reveals areas, products and teams performing below desired levels
Faros provides cross-org visibility into Agile360 metrics
Key Faros Benefits
Frictionless: There is no need to rearchitect tools or processes to achieve this level of visibility. Faros’s domain expertise applies data science to understand how your systems work today, so you generate intelligence without prematurely changing tools, practices, or processes.
Transparent: Every aspect of the Faros platform is transparent, including how the metrics are computed, the data used to compute them, and the source of the data.
Extensible: Faros is an API-first platform, extensible to any data source, use case, and application that serves or intersects with Engineering, e.g. HR, Finance, OKRs, Product, Customer Experience, and Compliance.
Reduce the Manual Effort to Produce the Assessment
Once the Agile360 responses are collected, McKinsey consultants process the output and convert it into outcome scores for deploying Agile at scale. Those outcome scores are then evaluated against benchmarks.
Faros can be configured with the benchmark values McKinsey applies and thus reduce the manual effort to translate assessment data into outcome scores. The benchmarks can be based on:
The DevOps Research and Assessment (DORA) Report (already exist in Faros)
McKinsey’s survey and expert view on best-in-class practices in top software and cloud companies
Industry and peer benchmarks
Organizational targets (if known)
Armed with these live benchmarks, the organization can clearly see its gaps, its blindspots, and its opportunities to achieve more for the business and for its customers.
Key Faros Benefits
Locate problem areas with surgical precision: For any use case, Faros provides trending, benchmarks, progress towards goals and targets, breakdowns by stages, and the ability to slice-and-dice by any dimension — like HR structure, location, product, or service.
Faros can provide a deep-dive view into a particular dimension highlighted by the Agile360 assessment
Continuous Assessment and Progress Tracking
The Agile360 assessment helps identify improvement opportunities along multiple dimensions. Once the assessment metrics have been instrumented in Faros, it becomes easy for McKinsey to track the impact of the changes as the organization enacts these recommendations.
With Faros constantly measuring and trending the Agile360 metrics and outcomes over time, it becomes easier to:
Make the case for change
Demonstrate ROI with ‘before and after’ metrics
Track progress over time
Diagnose emerging issues and new hotspots and tackle them proactively
Key Faros Benefits
Customizable metrics: As an organization undertakes improvement measures, new metrics and customized dashboards can closely track many important measures. For example, if the organization understands it must upskill its talent in specific areas, existing Faros modules or custom dashboards can be used for a closer analysis of the relevant workforce. Productivity metrics can be viewed in conjunction with information like seniority, tenure, location, and satisfaction.
Programmable: Faros automations leverage all the engineering data sources to remove friction and toil in day-to-day engineering operations. Automations can send alerts and reminders, enforce policies, and optimize workflows, to instill McKinsey best-in-class practices and recommendations for ways of working.
Faros automations leverage all your data sources to instill best practices in day-to-day engineering operations
Uncover New Opportunities to Create Value
With Faros in place throughout a McKinsey engagement, consultants can uncover new opportunities to create value for clients.
Optimally architected for machine learning and AI, Faros is able to sift through vast amounts of data to direct attention to trends, correlations, anomalies, and outliers. Embedded LLMs remove the barriers to understanding and probing the data further.
For example, Faros can calculate each product’s cloud cost per customer and rank the client’s portfolio based on ROI. This insight can help McKinsey advise its clients on where to increase investment or reduce budget allocations.
Key Faros Benefits
AI-Native: Faros harnesses AI to connect dozens of disparate systems and serve up insights and recommendations that help excellent engineering organizations make better decisions. Faros co-founder and Chief Scientist, Shubha Nabar, was named one of Forbes’ top women in AI.
Transforming to Data-Driven Engineering — Together
The synergy between McKinsey’s Agile360 methodology and Faros’s software engineering intelligence is strong, and the benefit to our mutual clients is boundless.
Reach out to us to explore opportunities to collaborate at faros.ai/partners
Dan Balter
Dan Balter, Head of Business Development and Partnerships at Faros, is an experienced entrepreneur known for fostering business growth and innovation. As a former VP of StarTau and Founder of Spyre Group, Dan’s strategic insights drive transformative partnerships and business initiatives at Faros.
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