Velo Blog

Category: Culture

  • Why we stopped tracking hours

    Why we stopped tracking hours

    We killed the timesheet in March. Nobody misses it. What replaced it made our finance team nervous for about six weeks, and then it stopped making them nervous. Here is what happened.

    What we track now

    We stopped asking engineers, designers, and PMs to log hours against project codes in Harvest. It rewarded the wrong thing: presence. A person could sit on a Linear ticket for three days, log 24 hours to it, and produce nothing shippable. The timesheet said the work was funded. The product said otherwise.

    We now track two things per squad, weekly, in a Notion database that pulls from Linear and GitHub:

    • Shipped units of work: tickets that closed the loop, meaning code merged, feature flagged on for at least one real customer, and no rollback within seven days.
    • Cycle time: median days from “In Progress” to “Shipped” on Linear, per squad, broken out by ticket size (S, M, L).

    That is it. No story points. No hours. If a squad shipped four medium tickets in a week with a cycle time of 3.2 days, that is the artifact. We review it every Thursday in a 25 minute meeting called Ship Review.

    What finance pushed back on

    Our CFO’s first question was fair: how do we capitalize engineering costs for the R&D credit if nobody is logging hours to projects? HMRC wants a defensible allocation. Auditors want a paper trail. “The vibes were good on Thursday” is not a paper trail.

    Her second question was harder. If a contractor bills us for 40 hours and we have no internal hours to compare against, how do we know we are not being overcharged?

    What we told them

    We proposed a trade. Finance gets a defensible model. Squads keep their calendars.

    1. Every squad has a fixed roster, and every roster maps to one or two product areas in a Notion table. Payroll cost per squad is known. That is our allocation basis, reviewed quarterly.
    2. Contractors still log hours in Harvest, because they bill by the hour. Employees do not, because they do not.
    3. The Ship Review output feeds a monthly note to finance: shipped units, cycle time trend, and any squad where cycle time doubled without a headcount change. That flags stuck work faster than a timesheet ever did.

    Six months in, our R&D claim went through without a query. Cycle time on our payments squad dropped from 8.1 days to 4.4. Nobody has asked to bring hours back.

    A timesheet measures whether you showed up. A shipped ticket measures whether the customer got something.

    We know which one we would rather report on.

  • Salary transparency, eighteen months in

    Salary transparency, eighteen months in

    In January of last year, we pushed a Notion page live to the whole company. It listed every role at Velo, the band it sat in, the floor, the ceiling, and the multiplier we used to convert level to base. We wrote about it on a Wednesday afternoon in Slack. By Friday, three people had asked for a chat.

    Eighteen months later, that page is still up. Some of what we expected happened. Most of what mattered did not. We wanted to write down what we published, what we held back, and one thing that broke.

    What we put on the page

    The Notion doc has six tabs. It contains everything a new hire or a curious teammate would ask us in a one to one:

    • Level definitions for engineering, design, product, and go to market, with three example projects per level.
    • Base salary bands for every level, in GBP and EUR, refreshed each January using Radford and our own market pulls.
    • The formula that turns level into offer: floor plus a location factor, capped at the ceiling.
    • Equity grants as a range of shares, plus a plain English note on our 409A and the strike price at the last round.
    • The rubric we use in promotion committee, including the four criteria and how we score them.
    • A change log at the bottom, so people can see when a band moved and why.

    We linked it from the onboarding checklist in Linear and pinned it in the #comp channel. New hires get a Loom walkthrough on day two.

    What we did not publish

    We were honest with ourselves about the gaps. A few things stayed off the page on purpose:

    • Individual salaries. We publish bands, not names. Two teammates asked for a fully open sheet in month four. We said no, and wrote a short doc explaining why.
    • Bonus targets for the two people on commission. Their plans are bespoke, and putting a range on them would have misled the rest of the team.
    • The one off retention grants we handed out during a rough patch last summer. Three people got them. We told each of them the same thing: this is not part of the standard rubric.
    • Founder salaries for the first year. We added those in month nine, after a Datadog outage weekend where the on call engineer asked, in a Slack DM, whether the founders were still on a discount. It was a fair question and we should have answered it sooner.

    We are still uneasy about the retention grants. If you publish a rubric and then quietly step outside it, you owe people an explanation. The next time we do one, it will show up in the change log with a category, even if the individual amounts do not.

    The hire that fell through

    In April, we were close to signing a senior backend engineer out of Berlin. She had spent an hour on a Figma review with our design lead and shipped a small GitHub PR against a starter repo. The team was ready.

    Our offer was the top of the L5 band. She had a competing offer that was twenty two percent higher, from a US company hiring in Europe. She sent us a screenshot of the other letter. We said no to the counter, because raising for one hire would have blown a hole through the band we had just published.

    She took the other job. It was the right call and it stung. If our page had been private, we would have found a way to say yes and moved on. Publishing the numbers meant we could not privately break our own rules without someone finding out on their first day. That constraint cost us a good hire.

    The point of writing something down is that it becomes harder to walk away from. That cuts both ways.

    The quiet compression

    The thing we did not predict was what happened to the bands themselves.

    Before publishing, our L4 engineering range spanned roughly forty percent floor to ceiling. Managers used the full width. Two people at the same level, hired six months apart, could sit twelve thousand pounds apart based on how the negotiation went.

    Once the numbers were visible, the top of the band became a promise. Anyone below the midpoint asked, reasonably, why. Over three review cycles, the width of that band shrank to about eighteen percent. Not because we changed the policy on paper, but because managers stopped defending the low end and stopped offering the high end without a clear promotion signal.

    The average went up. The variance went down. Our comp spend for the L4 cohort grew by nine percent year over year, and we lost the flexibility we used to have to reward a rare skill without moving someone a level.

    We are not sorry about it. It made every one to one about pay shorter, and it turned promotion committee, which meets the second Thursday of each month, into an argument about evidence rather than an argument about numbers. Two people got promoted last cycle who would have been talked out of it under the old system, because the manager could no longer say, quietly, that they were already paid like the next level.

    What we would do again

    If we were starting over, we would publish sooner and narrower. Wider bands look generous on paper. They also give managers room to make decisions they cannot defend in daylight. We would rather have the argument up front.

    The Notion page is still open in a tab on our screens most Fridays. It has not fixed hiring. It has made the conversation we have about pay a smaller, calmer thing. Given where we started, that is enough.

  • The quarter we shipped no features

    The quarter we shipped no features

    Last October, three days after our Q4 planning offsite, we made a decision that felt reckless at the time. We were going to spend the entire quarter without shipping a single new feature. No new modules, no new integrations, no new dashboards. Only bugs, docs, and the internal tools our engineers had been asking for since spring.

    Our head of sales, Mira, found out on a Monday morning during our weekly go-to-market sync. She went quiet for about eight seconds, then asked whether we were serious. We were.

    What sales was worried about

    Mira had four deals in the pipeline that hinged on a specific promise: a Snowflake connector we had been talking about since June. Two of those deals were mid-market, one was a renewal expansion, and one was a competitive replacement worth around 180k in annual contract value. She pulled up the deal notes in Notion and walked us through each one.

    The fear was reasonable. If we froze features for 90 days, three things could happen:

    • Prospects would walk to competitors who kept shipping.
    • Existing customers waiting on requested features would churn at renewal.
    • The sales team would lose narrative ammunition on discovery calls.

    We agreed to review the freeze monthly. If any of those signals showed up in the data, we would call it off. Mira asked us to write down what “showed up in the data” meant, so we did: net revenue retention below 108%, gross churn above 1.4% monthly, or two consecutive weeks of stalled pipeline movement on flagged deals.

    What we shipped instead

    The engineering team split into three squads. One squad, which we called Fixit, worked exclusively through Linear tickets tagged with the “customer-reported” label. Another squad, Docs, sat with our support lead every Tuesday to identify the top ten most-hit help center pages and rewrite them. The third squad, Tooling, built the internal admin console engineers had been begging for.

    By week six we had closed 247 bugs, some of which had been open for over a year. The Datadog dashboard we cared about, the one tracking p95 API latency, dropped from 840ms to 310ms after two engineers rewrote a query planner in the reporting service. Our support team went from 34 open Zendesk tickets on any given Friday to 9.

    The internal admin console was the surprise. Before Q4, resolving a customer-reported billing issue took an engineer about 40 minutes: pull data from three tables, reconcile in a Google Sheet, patch, verify. After the tooling squad shipped the console, our support engineers were doing the same work in under 4 minutes. They did not need to page anyone.

    By the end of week ten, our on-call rotation had gone from one incident per shift to one incident every six shifts. Two engineers told me they were sleeping better. One of them had been talking about leaving.

    What happened to churn

    Here is the part nobody predicted. Gross churn went down. Not by a huge amount, but measurably: from 1.2% monthly at the start of Q4 to 0.7% by December. Net revenue retention held at 114%.

    Mira’s Snowflake deals: three of the four closed anyway. The connector question came up on discovery calls, and the answer we gave, which was that we were spending the quarter on reliability instead of new surface area, played better than we expected. One of the buyers, a VP of data at a healthcare company, told us he had never heard a vendor say that out loud. He signed in November.

    Two effects we did not model

    First, our NPS moved from 42 to 51. We got unsolicited notes in Slack from customer success managers whose accounts had stopped filing tickets. Second, our engineering hiring pipeline got healthier. Three candidates in December mentioned during their onsite loop that they had read our internal writeup about the freeze and wanted to work at a place that took reliability seriously.

    What we would do differently

    We got lucky on a few things and would not repeat every choice.

    1. We underestimated how disorienting the freeze would feel to product managers. Two of them felt sidelined for six weeks before we figured out how to give them meaningful work reviewing customer feedback and shaping the Q1 roadmap.
    2. We should have communicated the freeze to customers on day one, not week three. When we finally sent the note explaining what we were doing, the response was overwhelmingly positive. We could have banked that goodwill earlier.
    3. We did not set clear exit criteria beyond the churn and NRR thresholds. When Q1 planning arrived, some of us wanted to extend the freeze another month, and we did not have a decision framework for that conversation.

    We are not going to do this every quarter. Growth still matters, and a company that only fixes bugs is a company that gets displaced. But we now know the shape of what a deliberate pause looks like, what it costs, and what it returns. Next time we consider one, the conversation will be shorter, and the fear in the room will be smaller.

  • What happened when we replaced standup with a doc

    What happened when we replaced standup with a doc

    The reason we cancelled the 9:15

    Our morning standup ran for eleven months before we killed it. Fifteen minutes on paper, twenty-two in practice, five people on video, one person still chewing toast. We tracked the cost for a quiet month: eleven engineers, four days a week, roughly nine hours of collective time each week vaporized into “yesterday I worked on the invoice bug, today I will keep working on the invoice bug.”

    The trigger was Linear. We had migrated our ticket board over from Jira, and the state of every ticket was suddenly legible without a human reading it aloud. Whatever the standup had been for, it was no longer for status.

    We wrote a shared Notion page called Daily. Each morning, before 10:00, you posted three lines: what shipped, what you are on, what is blocking you. That was the whole ritual. No meeting.

    Week one and two: something went wrong

    The first Monday felt like a small miracle. Everyone got the extra half hour, the doc filled up by 09:47, and we all stayed at our desks. By Thursday, two things were off.

    The doc was thinner than we expected. People wrote “same as yesterday” or copied their previous line and edited the date. The prose that had felt lively when spoken went dead when typed. Morale dipped too, in a way we did not predict. Not a crash, more like the room got quieter. Our head of design put it best in the retro:

    I did not realize how much of my sense of the team came from watching Priya groan about her PR review queue and Marcus talk about his kid’s soccer game. The doc has none of that. It reads like a receipt.

    Slack traffic went up during those two weeks, in a way that surprised us. Random channels filled with the small talk that had been living, uninvited, inside standup. We had removed the container without moving the contents anywhere. The contents leaked.

    The other loss was harder to measure. In standup, someone would say a sentence and someone else would say “wait, back up,” and a small course correction would happen in ninety seconds. In the doc, that same correction became a threaded Slack conversation that took two hours and ended with “let’s hop on a quick call.” We had traded one meeting for many smaller ones.

    Week three onward: the writing got serious

    Around the third week, the doc improved. A few things changed at once:

    • The team stopped treating the entry as a chore and started treating it as a note to a colleague. Entries got longer, more specific, funnier.
    • Blockers became first class. If you wrote “blocked on the Stripe webhook signature bug,” someone unrelated would read it over coffee and drop a link to the fix.
    • Async engineers in Lisbon and Toronto stopped feeling like second tier attendees. Their entries carried the same weight as the ones written in the London office.

    The deeper win was the writing itself. Engineers who had been quiet in meetings wrote sharp, thoughtful updates. One of them told us she had spent every standup rehearsing her sentence and missing what other people said. The doc gave her back that attention. Our design docs improved in the same period. We are not sure the two are causally linked, but it felt like a muscle getting more reps.

    The Wednesday sync, and why it stayed

    We tried holding out on the meeting free plan for a full month. It did not last. By week five we had put one meeting back on the calendar: a thirty minute sync on Wednesday at 10:00, camera on, no agenda beyond “how is the week going.” We call it Wednesday. That is the whole name.

    Wednesday is not a status meeting. If you tried to give a status update in it, someone would gently redirect you to the doc. It is where the soccer game goes, where the “I hate this ticket” goes, where the “I think we should reconsider the pricing page rewrite” goes. It has run for fourteen months now and we have cancelled it twice, both times for a company offsite.

    The compromise on paper:

    1. Monday through Friday: the Daily doc, posted by 10:00.
    2. Wednesday at 10:00: the thirty minute human sync.
    3. Friday afternoon: a short written retro in the same Notion space, three prompts, no meeting.

    Time saved per engineer, measured against the old standup, is roughly six hours a month. That number is real. What is less measurable, and what we think matters more, is that our written record of what happened each week is now searchable. When a new hire joins, we point them at three months of Daily entries and they get context that used to live only in people’s heads.

    What we would tell a team about to try this

    Two things. First, the social contract of standup is doing work you cannot see. If you remove the meeting without replacing the social part, the team will feel it within a week and blame the doc. Put the social part somewhere on purpose. Second, the doc will be bad for two weeks. Do not judge it before then. The writing muscle needs reps, and the first entries will read like receipts because the team is still thinking in bullet points from the meeting they no longer have.

    This setup would not work for a sales team, or a team spread across more than three time zones, or a team that responds to Datadog pages every hour. It works for eleven engineers and four designers who write for a living anyway. Your mileage will vary. Ours has not, in a year and change.