Sleuthing Out the Key to Teamwork with Dylan Etkin

Screaming in the Cloud

Corey Quinn chats with Dylan Etkin, CEO and co-founder of Sleuth. He joins this episode of Screaming Into the Cloud to share his insights on reshaping engineering metrics to prioritize team success. Sleuth emphasizes team-level productivity over individual output, sidestepping controversial metrics like lines of code and focusing on alignment and iterative improvement. By aggregating data from tools like GitHub, Jira, and Datadog, Sleuth provides actionable insights, helping leaders reallocate resources for optimal impact without disrupting unique team workflows. Designed for collaborative review, Sleuth’s slide deck-like interface supports meaningful discussions around DORA metrics and deploy tracking.

Show Highlights

(0:00) Intro

(0:51) Sleuth sponsor read

(1:12) What Sleuth is

(2:02) How Sleuth evaluates engineers’ work

(5:41) The value that evaluations brings to a business

(9:34) Who Dylan usually discusses results with

(11:04) Sleuth sponsor read

(11:30) The day-to-day experience of using Sleuth

(14:23) The importance of meeting people where they are

(18:21) The actual outcome of implementing Sleuth

(20:27) Why engineering teams should care about metrics

(24:27) The interface that people have when they're working with Sleuth

(26:23) Where you can find more from Sleuth

About Dylan Etkin
Dylan was one of the first twenty employees of Atlassian, and a founding engineer and the first architect of Jira. He has led engineering at scale for Bitbucket and Statuspage. He has a Master's in Computer Science from ASU. Dylan is a bit of a space nut and has been seen climbing around the inside of a life-size replica of the Mir space station in Star City Russia.

Sponsor
Sleuth: https://www.sleuth.io/