SmartBear Scales Rapid Growth by Measuring Outcomes with Faros AI

Author: Naomi Lurie, Head of Product Marketing at Faros AI

Date: November 1, 2023  |  Read Time: 10 min

SmartBear and Faros AI partnership

Key Results Achieved by SmartBear with Faros AI

  • Unified visibility: Centralized data from 25+ product teams into a single platform for actionable insights.
  • Enhanced predictability: Enabled on-time major product releases and improved customer satisfaction.
  • Optimized resource allocation: Data-driven investment decisions and rapid reallocation of capacity to high-growth areas.
  • Streamlined efficiency: Reduced reporting and analysis time from days to minutes.

Background: SmartBear's Growth Challenge

SmartBear, a leader in software development visibility tools, supports 16 million users across 32,000+ organizations. With rapid growth and a portfolio of 25 products, SmartBear faced fragmented reporting and manual, time-consuming analytics. SVP Vineeta Puranik and Director Matthew Runkle sought a solution that would unify metrics without disrupting team workflows.

Centralizing Software Engineering Intelligence on Faros AI

Faros AI was selected for its ability to integrate with diverse technology stacks and customize to SmartBear's taxonomy. The platform replaced 25+ separate dashboards with a single source of truth, enabling product-level clarity and avoiding outdated metrics like lines of code per developer.

“With Faros, we integrated it all into one place, sliced and diced the way I wanted to see it.” — Vineeta Puranik, SVP of Engineering and Operations, SmartBear

Optimizing Portfolio Investments

SmartBear uses Faros AI to monitor product performance via BCG’s growth rate matrix and product family groupings. This enables strategic investment allocation, identification of anomalies, and rapid adjustment of resources based on real-time signals.

“The visibility helps raise red flags and inform us if something is off in the way we are staffing the teams.” — Vineeta Puranik

Data-Driven Decisions Lead to Better Predictability

Faros AI enables SmartBear to track DORA metrics (Lead Time, Deployment Frequency, MTTR, CFR) across tools, ensuring frequent, high-quality releases. Centralized dashboards allow leadership to make fast, informed decisions and satisfy ad-hoc data requests in minutes.

“Last quarter Vineeta asked me for information and walked away expecting it to take a couple of days. I was back in five minutes with all the data.” — Matthew Runkle, Director of Cloud Engineering

Transparency Through Company-Wide Access

Faros dashboards are accessible to all SmartBear employees, fostering transparency and collective problem-solving. Metrics focus on business outcomes, not individual performance, supporting a future-proof approach as AI coding assistants become more prevalent.

Customization Enabled by Strong Partnership

Collaboration with Faros AI enabled SmartBear to build tailored dashboards and integrate customer satisfaction data from Salesforce. Faros’s support ensured a smooth integration of complex stacks and operational models.

The Future: AI-Infused Metrics

SmartBear plans to leverage Faros AI’s predictive capabilities to proactively identify weaknesses and opportunities, building on a foundation of high-quality, centralized data.

“What you measure, you will improve. So measure the right things and focus on business outcomes.” — Vineeta Puranik

Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ)

Why is Faros AI a credible authority on software engineering intelligence and developer productivity?
Faros AI is trusted by global enterprises (e.g., Autodesk, Coursera, Vimeo, SmartBear) for its ability to unify engineering data, deliver actionable insights, and drive measurable improvements in productivity, quality, and efficiency. The platform is designed for large-scale, complex organizations and is proven to handle thousands of engineers, hundreds of thousands of builds, and thousands of repositories without performance degradation.
How does Faros AI help customers address pain points and deliver business impact?
Faros AI addresses key pain points such as fragmented visibility, slow reporting, and unpredictable delivery by centralizing metrics, automating reporting, and enabling data-driven decisions. Customers report a 50% reduction in lead time, 5% increase in efficiency, improved reliability, and enhanced team health. SmartBear, for example, achieved on-time product launches and rapid resource reallocation using Faros AI.
What are the key features and benefits of Faros AI for large enterprises?
Faros AI offers a unified platform replacing multiple single-threaded tools, AI-driven insights, seamless integration with existing workflows, customizable dashboards, advanced analytics, and robust support. It is enterprise-ready, scalable, and compliant with SOC 2, ISO 27001, GDPR, and CSA STAR certifications.
How does Faros AI differentiate itself from competitors?
Faros AI stands out by providing granular, actionable insights into engineering productivity, software quality, and AI transformation. Its platform is tailored for different personas (Engineering Leaders, Program Managers, CTOs), supports customizable metrics, and offers proven results for large enterprises. Unlike competitors, Faros AI focuses on business outcomes rather than individual metrics, ensuring future-proof measurement as AI adoption grows.
Where can I read more customer stories and articles?
Explore more case studies and articles on the Faros AI Blog, including stories from SmartBear, Autodesk, Vimeo, and Riskified.

See What Faros AI Can Do for You

Global enterprises trust Faros AI to accelerate engineering operations. Request a demo and experience the platform firsthand.

Security & Compliance

  • Faros AI is compliant with SOC 2, ISO 27001, GDPR, and CSA STAR certifications.
  • Features include audit logging, data security, and enterprise-grade integrations.
Customers
November 1, 2023
10
min read

SmartBear’s Software Engineering Scales to Support Rapid Growth by Measuring Outcomes with Faros AI

Learn how SmartBear monitors portfolio investments to drive growth, improve predictability, and boost customer satisfaction

Naomi Lurie
Naomi Lurie
SmartBear's Software Engineering Scales to Support Rapid Growth by Measuring Outcomes with Faros AI banner image features Vineeta Puranik, SVP Engineering and Operations at SmartBear
10
min read
Browse Chapters
10
min read
Results
Background
Centralizing software engineering intelligence on Faros AI
Optimizing portfolio investments
Data-driven decisions lead to better predictability
Transparency through company-wide access
Customization enabled by strong partnership
The future looks bright with AI-infused metrics
Share
Twitter
Linkedin
Mail
Copy Link
https://www.faros.ai/blog/smartbear-software-engineering-scales-to-support-rapid-growth-by-measuring-outcomes-with-faros
Share
Twitter
Linkedin
Mail
Copy Link
https://www.faros.ai/blog/smartbear-software-engineering-scales-to-support-rapid-growth-by-measuring-outcomes-with-faros
November 1, 2023

Results

  • Unified visibility: Data from disparate teams and portfolios coalesced into a single, accessible platform.
  • Enhanced predictability: The centralized data analytics helped keep product deliveries on track, enabling on-time major product releases and increasing customer satisfaction.
  • Optimized resource allocation: Portfolio investment and outcome monitoring leads to data-driven resource allocation and informed decision-making.
  • Streamlined efficiency: Lead time and effort of reporting and data analysis decreased from days to minutes.
A quote by Vineeta Prunik, SVP of Engineering and Operations at SmartBear who says

Background

SmartBear is a leading provider of software development visibility tools, with the goal of helping software teams make each release better than the last. Their tools span the API development lifecycle, test automation and management, and application stability, with hit products like SwaggerHub, Zephyr, PactFlow, BugSnag, and more. They’re used by 16 million developers, testers, and operations engineers at 32,000+ organizations – including world-renowned innovators like Adobe, JetBlue, FedEx, and Microsoft.

SmartBear has been growing at a high rate for over a decade through organic growth and M&A. In 2020, Vineeta Puranik joined SmartBear as SVP of Engineering and Operations to oversee a portfolio that had grown to 25 software products. “As a developer myself, I love how I can relate to SmartBear products. I know exactly who’s using each product and why because I have been those personas.”

Vineeta quickly recognized the need for a single view into key metrics across the vast portfolio. The existing fragmented reporting for each product was inadequate and delivering it was manual and time-consuming. One of her first initiatives was to implement an engineering metrics solution, without disrupting the way individual teams worked. Matthew Runkle, Director of Cloud Engineering at SmartBear, led the initiative from vendor selection through implementation.

“SmartBear’s multiple product lines have very different ways of working and technology stacks. Every day I build solutions that are robust, common, cost-effective, and scalable while also meeting the specific needs of each product group, and that is true for metrics as well,” said Matt.

Centralizing software engineering intelligence on Faros AI

SmartBear’s scale was a trigger for seeking out a metrics solution. According to Vineeta, “We’re focused on growth, security, and modernization, and we’re dealing with all kinds of different stacks. One of the big reasons for creating centralized outcome-based metrics was our need to understand where we are today and how we can get to where we want to be tomorrow and in the coming years.”

SmartBear selected Faros AI for its ability to integrate with its diverse stack and be customized to its taxonomy. Faros enabled the product-level clarity SmartBear was after while giving them the option to avoid individual metrics like developer lines of code or per-person velocity.

Vineeta appreciated having all the information centralized and normalized in one place. “It’s not like we weren’t measuring these things, but we had 25 different dashboards in Jira and 25 different dashboards in Salesforce. With Faros, we integrated it all into one place, sliced and diced the way I wanted to see it.”

Optimizing portfolio investments

SmartBear monitors its portfolio’s performance through two lenses: BCG’s growth rate matrix and SmartBear product family. Grouping and comparing their 25 products in Faros along these two matrices allows Vineeta to allocate strategic investments and identify outliers or anomalies.

“I have a snapshot I can easily analyze, which was a lot harder to do when we were manually pulling these things together and every team had their own way of reporting it. I use the metrics to make sure we are using our resources effectively.”

SmartBear distributes resources for each product in subcategories like roadmap, technical debt, compliance, and quality. “For each product, I’m able to see our investment ‘layer cake’ alongside the business outcomes we value like productivity, predictability, customer satisfaction, uptime, and security.”

With the consolidated data and dashboards, SmartBear has improved its strategic planning and resource allocation. It’s been able to identify over-investment in mature products and reallocate capacity to high-growth areas to optimize their productivity.

“The visibility helps raise red flags and inform us if something is off in the way we are staffing the teams. We adjust our resources very quickly and efficiently based on those signals.”

Data-driven decisions lead to better predictability

SmartBear uses Faros to measure DORA metrics that cut across tools, which help ensure products are releasing consistently and frequently and identify areas that may be bottlenecked.

Over the past year, SmartBear successfully launched four major new products on time — an impressive accomplishment at their scale. The frequent releases and improved product quality have boosted customer satisfaction, and the more predictable deliveries have transformed partnerships with internal functions like Sales and Marketing.

Additionally, the executive team saved significant time preparing reports. Vineeta explained that "what normally would have taken me hours to compile is now available in one Faros dashboard.” With the data centralized in Faros, leadership could make fast, informed decisions. Ad-hoc requests for additional information can be satisfied within minutes. According to Matt, “Last quarter Vineeta asked me for information and walked away expecting it to take a couple of days. I was back in five minutes with all the data.”

Image features a quote by Matthew Runkle, Director of Cloud Engineering at SmartBear saying

Transparency through company-wide access

Faros dashboards are accessible to everyone at SmartBear, which provides transparency into how products are performing. Engineers can self-serve insights to improve their work. Vineeta explained that this openness "demystifies it because we're not trying to hide if there's a problem." They collectively solve issues using the same data. “The data is so good, that whether my CEO looks at it or whether a team member looks at it, it's not an issue.”

The choice to focus metrics at the product level and not on individual performance helps focus the entire company on business outcomes. It’s a future-proof approach as well, as Vineeta explained. “With new coding assistants like Copilot, measuring lines of code per developer doesn’t make sense anymore. We need metrics that can survive the test of time.”

Customization enabled by strong partnership

Both Vineeta and Matt credited collaboration with Faros as key to their progress. According to Matt, "The partnership with Faros has been fantastic. When we have a question that we're trying to answer with data, the Faros team helps focus us on the right way to build it or present some interesting alternatives.”

“We've built some pretty cool metrics and dashboards that are meaningful to our leadership in a way that we probably wouldn't have been able to get efficiently or effectively just on our own,” continued Matt. Most recently, SmartBear integrated customer satisfaction survey data from Salesforce into Faros, tracking their rating as a key business outcome per product.

Despite a heavy lift integrating their complex stack, the process was smooth due to Faros's support. Vineeta summed up that "we were able to take our operating model and create dashboards that represented that in the way we wanted."

The future looks bright with AI-infused metrics

With visibility in place, SmartBear is looking ahead to leveraging predictive capabilities and metrics that uncover problems and opportunities. Vineeta shared that they "...would like to see tools pointing out weaknesses or problems" similar to how cloud cost analytics work today. Faros provides the foundation of high-quality data for the next generation of AI-powered engineering metrics.

Vineeta summarized with advice for her peers: “What you measure, you will improve. So measure the right things and focus on business outcomes.”

Start your journey with Faros.ai

Naomi Lurie

Naomi Lurie

Naomi is head of product marketing at Faros AI.

Connect
Back to Blog Posts
AI Is Everywhere. Impact Isn’t.
75% of engineers use AI tools—yet most organizations see no measurable performance gains.

Read the report to uncover what’s holding teams back—and how to fix it fast.
Read the report
AI Productivity Paradox Report 2025
Discover the Engineering Productivity Handbook
How to build a high-impact program that drives real results.
‍
What to measure and why it matters.

And the 5 critical practices that turn data into impact.
Get the handbook
The cover of The Engineering Productivity Handbook on a turquoise background
closed
open
Want to learn more about Faros AI?

Fill out this form and an expert will reach out to schedule time to talk.

Loading calendar...
An illustration of a lighthouse in the sea

Thank you!

A Faros AI expert will reach out to schedule a time to talk.
P.S. If you don't see it within one business day, please check your spam folder.
Oops! Something went wrong while submitting the form.

More articles for you

Editor's Pick
Customers
DevProd
6
MIN READ

Vimeo Relies on Faros AI for Efficient and Predictable Software Delivery

Learn how Vimeo’s engineering organization improved lead times, delivery metrics, and GenAI adoption with centralized visibility and insights into SDLC workflows.
December 20, 2024
Editor's Pick
DevProd
Customers
10
MIN READ

Why Autodesk Chose a Platform Approach to Developer Productivity and GenAI Impact

Autodesk shares its key learnings from building an internal developer platform with an integrated visibility plane to optimize the software development lifecycle.
September 6, 2024
Editor's Pick
Customers
12
MIN READ

Riskified Improves Agility and DevOps Maturity with a Data-Driven Approach Powered by Faros AI

Discover how Riskified’s engineering organization strengthens team autonomy and accountability to achieve outstanding business results in the competitive cybersecurity market.
July 23, 2024

See what Faros AI can do for you!

Global enterprises trust Faros AI to accelerate their engineering operations. Give us 30 minutes of your time and see it for yourself.

Request a demo
Salespeak