# develoom pilot teams > develoom maps everyday engineering work to your own career ladder, so growth is written down before the review instead of reconstructed after it. For engineering leaders at 15 to 100 person engineering teams. 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 this is not 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, ticket, design doc, and thread in a channel your team already shares, 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 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. 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. The standard that decides promotions is rarely written anywhere an engineer can read it, so it surfaces once a year as a surprise. 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. ## Walkthrough Video: (about three minutes, embedded on the page through youtube-nocookie.com, click to play). Three minutes and thirteen seconds of the product itself, running on sample data. It shows one engineer's record, mapped to your career ladder and to the company goals their work actually moved. ## How it works 1. **Connect once.** GitHub, Linear, Slack, Google Docs. You approve read access once, develoom never asks to write anything, and it is done in minutes. 2. **Map to your career ladder.** Each pull request, ticket, doc, and thread is mapped to the levels in your own ladder. No manual tagging. If your ladder needs work, we shape it with you, using what already works at teams your size. 3. **The engineer sees the same record.** Every engineer gets their own continuous growth picture. The team view is built from exactly the same records, at the same time. What a manager reads about an engineer, that engineer reads too. develoom is built around GitHub, Slack, Jira, Linear, Confluence, Google Docs, and Google Calendar. 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. ## Data and boundaries What develoom does not read: private Slack DMs, private channels, repositories your own account cannot already open, and 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 pull requests, 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. The judgement stays with the manager. - **Zero training.** Customer 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. We help with the setup and the integrations rather than handing you a manual. - **Delete anytime.** Disconnect and the data is deleted within 24 hours. - **Built to be audited.** develoom is built to ISO 27001 and SOC 2 practices from the start. Neither certificate is in hand yet: we are working towards both. Full detail is on the [privacy page](https://develoom.com/privacy). ## 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. 1. "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) 2. "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) ## 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. **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. **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 they 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. 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. ## The business case 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. - **Retention.** Lack of career development is the most cited reason people quit. Replacing a senior engineer is competitive, slow, and expensive, and the new hire takes months to reach full productivity. Progress nobody wrote down is the easiest kind to lose track of. - **Manager ramp.** 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. An evidence-backed picture of each report gives them something better to open with. - **What counts now.** 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. - **Fairness.** Engineers who ship steadily without narrating it are the easiest people in the company to misjudge, in exactly the meetings where it matters most. If you need to send this to your people team, the page carries a paragraph written to be pasted straight into a message. ## The pilot Twelve 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, and we get to build it around a real team instead of guessing. Before you commit to anything, we map your ladder and run one engineer's real history through it, so you review actual output rather than taking our word for it. Free access for the full 12 weeks, your career ladder built into the product level by level, the integrations your stack needs built during the pilot, self-hosting if you want it with help on the setup, a direct line to whoever is building it, and real influence over what gets built next. Nothing starts charging on its own. What happens after the 12 weeks is a conversation, and you have a hand in it. We are looking for an engineering team of 15 to 100 people, a career ladder you actually use even if it is rough, and occasional honest feedback, which is what decides the roadmap. We adapt to your stack. develoom is built by [Johnny Fekete](https://www.linkedin.com/in/johnnyfekete), who has spent his career in engineering teams and sat through the reviews this is meant to fix, and [Laurits Just](https://www.linkedin.com/in/laurits-just/), who runs go to market. You will be talking to one of us on the call, not to a salesperson. ### Talk to us Book a 20 minute walkthrough: If you would rather not book yet, leave an email on the pilot page or write to hello@develoom.com and tell us about your team. No newsletters and nothing automated. ## Related - [Home](https://develoom.com/): what develoom is and how it works. - [Source context](https://develoom.com/source-context): the evidence read per competency and IC level. - [Privacy](https://develoom.com/privacy): what is collected, read, and deleted. - [Contact](https://develoom.com/contact): other ways to reach us.