For engineering leaders at 15 to 100 person engineering teams
Walk into every performance review with the evidence already written.
Design docs, ticket comments, code reviews, Slack threads. How your engineers are growing is already written down in your tools. develoom maps it to your own career ladder, not to a vendor’s idea of a good engineer, and every engineer reads the same record their manager reads, all year.
What develoom is not
This is not an engineering dashboard.
Engineering analytics tools measure output and report it upward. develoom reads the work your engineers already published and writes down how each of them is growing, against your own career ladder. The record it draws on already exists, in every pull request, every ticket, every design doc, every thread in a channel your team already shares. It is written down and it is dated, and nobody reads it until the worst possible week.
develoom asks your engineers for nothing new. And there are three things it will never do with what it reads.
-
No leaderboards
develoom does not rank engineers against each other, and it does not output a performance score.
-
No output metrics
No lines of code, no commit counts, no velocity charts. Those counted typing, and AI now does a lot of the typing.
-
No manager-only file
Every engineer reads their own record. It is the same record their manager reads.
The problem
Review season is already too late.
“I’ve never found an easy solution that gives me a continuous picture of how my engineers are actually doing. I want it badly enough I’m considering building it my damn self.”
Managers write performance reviews from memory, scattered notes, and gut feel. By the time they sit down to write them, most of the story is already gone.
Good engineers get underpromoted because nobody documented the impact. Struggling engineers stay struggling because nobody caught it early enough to help. Both failures have the same cause: the evidence existed all year and nobody read it.
Every manager runs into this, and it is sharpest for new ones. Engineering managers are usually promoted from the team, for being good at a job they now do less of, and plenty of them get little or no training for the one they moved into. They end up assessing people they were peers with, and the instinct is to keep managing the code.
Meanwhile the standard that actually decides promotions is rarely written anywhere an engineer can read it. So it surfaces once a year, as a surprise, in the form of “you didn’t contribute enough to the wider initiatives.” Tell an engineer which things beyond their day job count, and they will go and do them. That goes double for engineers earlier in their careers, who will not volunteer for work nobody told them counts. Leave it implicit and they optimise for whatever is visible.
Engineering analytics point everything at a leadership dashboard. HR platforms can sync a ticket count, but none of them read the design doc.
Three minute walkthrough
What your last review cycle could have looked like.
One engineer’s record, mapped to your career ladder and to the company goals their work actually moved. That is the connection most review cycles never manage to draw. Sample data throughout, real product.
Three minutes and thirteen seconds of the product itself, running on sample data.
How it works
Three steps, and then it keeps itself current.
- 01
Connect once
GitHub, Linear, Slack, Google Docs. You approve read access once, develoom never asks to write anything, and it is done in minutes. No agents to install, no plugins, nothing for your engineers to fill in.
- 02
Map to your career ladder
develoom reads what is already flowing through those tools and maps each pull request, ticket, doc, and thread to the levels in your own ladder. No manual tagging, no spreadsheets, nothing for your engineers to write up. If your ladder needs work, we shape it with you, using what already works at teams your size.
- 03
The engineer sees the same record
Every engineer gets their own continuous growth picture: what they shipped, how it maps to your ladder, what to work on next. Your team view is built from exactly the same records, at the same time. What you read about an engineer, that engineer reads too.
Your stack
The tools already running your team.
develoom is built around the tools engineering teams already run on. As a pilot team you get the integrations your stack actually needs, built against your own tools rather than a generic set. Tell us what you run, and we meet your engineers there.
- GitHub
- Slack
- Jira
- Linear
- Confluence
- Google Docs
- Google Calendar
Data and boundaries
Your engineers’ data stays where it is.
Your engineers’ data is theirs and yours, never ours. That is a commitment, and here is exactly what it means in practice, with no small print underneath.
What develoom does not read
Private Slack DMs. Private channels. Repositories your own account cannot already open. Calendar entries your team does not already share with colleagues. develoom checks your existing access controls: if a manager cannot see something in GitHub, Jira, or Slack today, develoom does not show it to them.
Read access only
develoom asks each tool for read access only, and never asks to post, edit, or delete anything. You see the exact list of what it asks for before you approve it.
Public channels only
develoom never asks for access to direct messages or private channels. It reads public Slack channels and the code reviews, tickets, and docs your team already shares.
Summaries, not archives
Activity is processed into growth evidence and nothing else. There is no searchable archive of your engineers’ commits, messages, or tickets to leak, subpoena, or hand to the next manager.
Not a ranking
No leaderboard, no score, no rating. develoom assembles the evidence. The judgement stays with you, where it belongs.
Zero training
Your team’s data is never used to train an AI model. develoom’s AI vendors are contractually barred from training on customer data, and develoom can run on open models inside your own infrastructure.
Self-hosting possible
By default develoom runs on our infrastructure. If you would rather it ran inside yours, it can, and no engineering data leaves your building at all. We help with the setup and the integrations rather than handing you a manual.
Delete anytime
Disconnect whenever you like and the data is deleted within 24 hours. No retention clause, no exit call.
Built to be audited
develoom is built to ISO 27001 and SOC 2 practices from the start. Neither certificate is in hand yet and we will not pretend otherwise: we are working towards both, and we will show you exactly where we are on the call.
Bring the rest to the call, and bring your security lead.
Field research
What 20+ engineering leaders told us.
develoom has not shipped to a customer yet, so there are no logos on this page and no metrics that would mean anything. What there is: 20+ conversations with people running 15 to 100 engineers, asking what actually breaks at review time. Two themes came up in nearly every conversation.
- 01
“Good managers want to enable underperforming engineers, not remove them. The problem is they do not have the data to do that in real time.”
VP Engineering · B2B SaaS · Series B
- 02
“Every engineer I know has been blindsided at a review at least once. It should not be possible with the data that already exists.”
Engineering Manager · Series A SaaS
Straight answers
The questions worth asking.
- What if we do not have a career ladder?
- Bring what you have, even a doc nobody has opened in a year. develoom maps to whatever you actually use, and the pilot starts by getting your ladder into the product. If you do not have one, we build it with you from what already works at teams your size. Plenty of teams finish a pilot with a career ladder worth keeping, which is worth something on its own.
- Why not just use our HR system?
- Because it cannot see the work. HR platforms are built around cycles, forms, and ratings, and the most they read of engineering is a ticket count. Performance review software collects opinions. develoom collects evidence, then hands it to the same review process you already run. If your HR system can already tell you which engineer has quietly been carrying the platform migration, you do not need this.
- How is this different from engineering analytics tools like Jellyfish, LinearB, or Swarmia?
- Those measure how the system delivers, against the vendor’s model of engineering. develoom measures individual growth against your own ladder, and it reports to the engineer first. Different reader, different question. Run both: they answer things that do not overlap.
- Will my engineers feel watched?
- develoom reads work your engineers already published, in places their colleagues can already see, and it shows each engineer their own record before anyone else sees it. It asks them for nothing new. Surveillance is watching people to catch them out; this hands the engineer the same evidence their manager holds. No DMs, no private channels, no leaderboard, no manager-only file. Most engineers land on the other side of it once they see it: knowing which areas actually count is the difference between guessing at promotion criteria and working towards them, and develoom tells each engineer what to do next rather than only what they did. If develoom ever needs to watch something new to be useful, it will have stopped being the product on this page.
The business case
What this is worth to the company.
develoom runs on engineering data, but the case for it is a people case. Almost nothing in the HR stack can see an engineering org clearly, which is most of the reason review season still runs on memory.
Four things get expensive when nobody can see how engineers are growing.
-
Retention
The people you cannot easily replace
Lack of career development is the most cited reason people quit their jobs. The market to replace a senior engineer is competitive, slow, and expensive, and whoever you hire takes months to reach full productivity. Progress nobody wrote down is the easiest kind to lose track of.
-
Manager ramp
New managers who find their feet in weeks
A first-time engineering manager with no training and no idea how to run a one-to-one falls back on the thing they know, which is the code. A continuous, evidence-backed picture of each report gives them something better to open with, and it is there from the first month.
-
What counts now
AI writes the code. The job is what is left.
Agents now write a large share of the code, so what separates one level from the next is design, review, unblocking other people, and judgement. None of that shows up in a commit count. develoom reads the part that is left, which is the part that was always the job.
-
Fairness
Quiet delivery is not low performance
Engineers who ship steadily without narrating it are the easiest people in the company to misjudge, and the ones most likely to be misjudged in exactly the meetings that matter. The evidence to correct that already exists. It just has to be readable when the decision gets made.
If you need to send this to your people team
We are looking at a tool called develoom for the engineering org. It connects to the tools the team already uses and keeps a continuous, evidence-based record of how each engineer is growing, mapped to our own career ladder. The engineer and their manager see the same record. The case for it is a people case: lack of career development is the most cited reason people quit, replacing a senior engineer is slow and expensive, and progress nobody wrote down is the easiest kind to lose track of. It also gives first-time managers something concrete to run one-to-ones from. They run a free 12 week pilot with a small group of teams who get to shape the product. I want us in it.
The pilot
12 weeks, on us.
develoom is choosing its first small group of engineering teams, who get to shape the product while it is being built. You get it free for 12 weeks. We build it around your team instead of guessing.
What you get
- Before you commit to anything, we map your ladder and run one engineer’s real history through it. You review actual output rather than taking our word for it.
- Free access for the full 12 weeks. No card, and no trial that quietly converts.
- Your career ladder built into the product, level by level, and the connectors your stack needs built during the pilot, against your tools.
- Self-hosting if you want it, with help on the setup and the integrations rather than a manual.
- A direct line to whoever is building it, and real influence over what gets built next.
What we are looking for
- An engineering team of 15 to 100 people. We adapt to your stack.
- A career ladder you actually use, even a rough one.
- Occasional honest feedback. It is what decides the roadmap.
Nothing starts charging on its own. What happens after the 12 weeks is a conversation, and you have a hand in it.
develoom is built by Johnny Fekete, who has spent his career in engineering teams and sat through the reviews this is meant to fix, and Laurits Just, who runs go to market. You will be talking to one of us on the call, not to a salesperson.
First look when a slot opens.
Leave an email and you hear from us when a slot opens for a team your size, and when there is something worth your time. One email at a time. No newsletter, nothing automated.
Got it.
We’ll be in touch when there’s a slot for a team like yours. The walkthrough above is the product, today, not a mockup.
Something didn’t work. Try again, or email [email protected].
Or write directly to [email protected].