Okay nabs funding from Sequoia to build performance dashboards for engineering managers
Summary
Okay is taking a more observatory route, aiming to give managers dashboards that quantify the performance of their teams so that they can get a picture of where they have room to improve.The startup, which launched out of Y Combinator earlier this year, tells TechCrunch theyve raised $2.2 million in funding led by Sequoia and are launching the open beta of their service.Co-founders Antoine Boulanger and Tomas Barreto met while working at Box -- Boulanger as a senior director of engineering and Barreto as a VP of engineering. For the most part, Boulanger says that today Okay is largely replacing tools built in-house as well.Getting a picture of an engineering teams productivity means plugging into these toolsets and gathering data into a digestible feed. Barreto tells TechCrunch.A large part of Okays sell seems to be ensuring that managers can keep an active eye on the common pitfalls of rapid scaling and keep them in check so they can keep direct-reports satisfied. Okays founders hope they can strike a balance and give managers data that theyre not tempted to over-rely on, instead defaulting to team-level insights when they can so that managers are dialed into general trends like how long projects are taking on average or how long it takes for pull requests to be reviewed.Investors have been bankrolling remote work tools at a heightened pace for the last several months and things have been especially fortunate for young companies that were ahead of the trend. Barreto, for his part, has served as a scout at Sequoia since 2018 according to his LinkedIn.The team says their product, as it stands today, is best fit for companies with 50-200 engineers that are high growth and perhaps going through some of those growing pains.