Velo Blog

Tag: culture

  • 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.