Automation Culture in Phrase
Automation has become an essential part of our work life to leverage the real potential of people. How do we stand in Phrase?
We live in a time where software companies, including Phrase, prefer an agile approach in order to quickly adapt to customer demands; marketing and delivering features with the favorite deadline “the sooner the better”. To support such needs, we must adapt to stay efficient while preserving quality, having metrics and overviews about progress, profitability, troubles, etc. That leads us to a variety of automation and integrations which help us fulfill tasks as a part of daily routine without significant investment. Here are some benefits of automation:
- Elimination of human errors
- Efficiency and consistency for repeatable processes
- Automatic markers, triggers, dashboards, reports, and analysis
- Allowing people to focus on fulfilling and meaningful tasks
- Significant time savings and space for ideation
All of this helps with the evolution of tasks and improves the productivity of employees, which leads to team and product growth, and accelerates the company itself. That’s why we should consider automation as an important aspect of our business, not just in the engineering departments, but across the whole company, as every team has its own needs within the automation field.
My personal experience
I made a change in my career two years ago. I came to Phrase, which was Memsource at the time, from an international software company and was pleasantly surprised by the culture. One might expect that a smaller, still a bit of start-up company, wouldn’t have enough resources to invest in topics that are not directly related to the business but it turned out that the opposite was true. In Phrase, reasonable automation always found support from colleagues and management. At least, that was my subjective feeling and also my original motivation for this article — to find out how true this is across all our departments.
Internal Survey on Automation
I ran a short survey mostly focusing on Team leaders. I received answers from 14 people who responded about the teams they work on. Besides other things, it showed that most of the teams have very specific aspects of automation that are crucial for them — which makes company-wide automation a minority.
Before we dive into the results, I’d like to ask you to treat them as rough estimates and, in one noted case, even as a guess. The goal of the survey was to obtain rough numbers to understand our automation trends. Accurate statistics are not worth the time and effort the preparation would require and in some cases, would even be unfeasible.
How many automated tasks does your team use?
At the beginning of a discussion with our VP of Engineering, we estimated that we have tens of automation tasks. From the survey, we can calculate that the teams who responded (covers approx. 80% of all people) are using more than 130 automation tasks. Certainly, there will be some duplication in the answers but also some forgotten automations which have already become part of our ordinary lives. There is also huge automation masterwork done in the services used for monitoring and maintaining the stability of Phrase Cloud, which wasn’t included in the answers but would increase the number by additional tens.
How many people from your team have contributed to the automation & integrations in the past?
When we combine results with the headcount in the related departments we get the summary shown above. Data was collected from 82 people in the company and approximately 49 of those people had already contributed in the past. That’s almost 60% of employees. Let me remind you that we are not only speaking about development teams; in the Sales and Support teams, every single team member contributes to the automation to improve the workflow.
How much time do you think every team member saves by all automation & integrations on average per week?
This is the guessing question. Probably no one is capable of measuring precisely how much time is actually saved. Let’s assume that we have collected numbers which are accurate enough. When I compute the average savings for every person it says that 7% of time from the weekly duties is saved — a bit less than 3 hours. Although it’s not a low value, it seems that the more valuable benefit lies in other aspects — more advanced tasks and various automated triggers and metrics which help us to make more informed and better decisions.
How many automation & integrations do you personally use in Phrase in comparison to your previous jobs?
This was a question to satisfy my personal curiosity and to see how objective my claim is that Phrase is an automation-friendly environment. We mentioned that the results came from 14 people so there will be some statistical issues. Only 2 people used more automation in their previous jobs, nobody answered that it’s the same in the previous and current job and 12 people think that we are doing better. We’ve all had some bad employment in the past or there must be some truth in my claim.
When you create new automation & integration, is there anything you miss (for example: lack of time, resources, specific tool, etc.)?
This question allowed open text answers but the results were so unified that it was possible to group them in three categories. The GDPR answer comes from someone in our sales department expressing the fact that this EU regulation limits them from using tools and automation in a way that was beneficial before. Three teams express a lack of time. Remaining teams are satisfied with the level of support they are able to get within the company. The most positive information we can see in the results is that nobody feels hindered by any directives, lack of resources, or missing tools that could be leveraged for new ideas concerning automation.
Few words with the VP of Engineering
I couldn’t resist scheduling a short appointment with Michal Kebrt, Principal Engineer. I believe that many of us perceive him as the main promoter of the automation & integration work within Phrase. He is encouraging teams, as well as individual people, to go for such investments and in many cases, he brings new tools and possibilities.
He mentioned the strategy of seeking “low-hanging fruit” for tools that don’t require a lot of investment and still provide solid benefits. Still, he doesn’t hesitate to invest or support even complex automation if he finds it beneficial, especially because Phrase is a growing company and the benefits continue to extend as more people join us.
The automation Michal is the proudest of is our current capability to do automated rolling updates of our components. We have three full-stack environments and all of them are running 15 services under the hood. Currently, we are able to renew the version of the testing environment with minimal investment and potentially redeploy it to production daily when we need to get hotfixes to customers immediately. The same applies to the maintenance of the production site. Any suspicion or incident is monitored and the system informs us respectively about its severity over Slack, email, or phone, and some alerts are accompanied by the ability for automatic recovery.
Epilogue
Every team has its crucial automation area. Engineering leverages automated deployments, Targetprocess ticket states synchronize with GitLab, automated tagging, git macros, etc. Sales depends on the integration of Salesforce with Google Apps and Phrase Cloud, the same applies to Support and its connection to Zendesk, where our clients can request support for our product and we can leverage their context in order to provide help. There is also automatic prefilling of RFPs for our Solution Architects, QA with plenty of Targetprocess reports and automatic rules for dealing with quality, Marketing utilizing Pardot to become close partners with sales, and a special chapter would be the Artificial Intelligence team where the usage of automation is daily bread in the form of AWS lambda functions or YAPR — their custom tool for orchestrating pipelines in AWS.
The survey revealed that there are plenty of interesting areas and some of these will possibly be covered by future blog posts. For every team, the planning and prioritization of workload can’t focus in a single direction and we need to find the right balance. Still, from the results, it is obvious that Phrase employees are investing a significant effort which is paying off and there are no reasons why not to continue working with automation.
I would like to thank every colleague who contributed to the survey and who helped me write this article.
