Case Study: How Hostaway started shipping four times faster while doubling their engineering headcount
Key results
The challenge
As Hostaway's engineering team grew, Director of Engineering Adam Kupcewicz found it increasingly hard to see what developers were working on or where productivity bottlenecks sat. After implementing Swarmia, he could see that time to first review, review rate, and cycle time had all been trending in the wrong direction.
The solution
After evaluating Swarmia and LinearB, Hostaway onboarded all its engineers to Swarmia. Teams set working agreements — avoiding direct pushes to the default branch, reviewing pull requests within three days, and linking PRs to issues — and used the insights and investment balance views to guide process changes.
“We then set the right working agreements, and our time to deploy reduced from four days to less than 24 hours.”
AKAdam KupcewiczDirector of Engineering at Hostaway
The results, in context
Hostaway reduced time to deploy from four days to under 24 hours, a 75% cut, and reduced cycle times by 50%. Technical debt fell from 24% to 5% and the review rate increased, all while the company almost tripled its engineering headcount.