Enji.ai — a startup that monitors team efficiency

Oleg Puzanov, Bishkek, CSO Mad Devs maddevs.io and Enji.ai

How it all started

For us at Mad Devs, remote work was the norm even before it became mainstream in Tech. We have over 100 employees working all over the world — Kyrgyzstan, Poland, Georgia, Thailand and so on. We have never been adherents of strict office work. The main thing is the result of the work, not where it is done from. This is a big plus for employees, but for management there are nuances. The time difference still played a role. So we needed a tool that would help us track processes and synchronize work.

That is how the Slack-bot Comedian for writing standups came to be. It is not about humor at all, as it may seem. In different projects and departments, teams used it to write short reports on what they were doing, what they had already accomplished, and what blockers there were. Over time, we found an important thing: it is convenient for processes — one, it is convenient for analytics — two. Memorized and fixed in our heads.

In 2018, I was invited to Bangkok to do a technical audit of a large e-commerce company in Thailand. There they shared with me an interesting thought that I remembered for a long time: «Oleg, in all the companies we invest in, we collect a bunch of metrics. And software metrics are either it is there or it is not. Its quality is not important because software is always crap».

Again, I was clearly shown that I needed a tool that set up software development processes and helped me collect quality data.

Then came the covid times, when we were all put back home. Remote work became a necessity rather than a whim. There was an increased demand for process transparency and the collection of all meaningful metrics to keep companies afloat. Thus began our journey to create Enji.ai.

Enji.ai is the teamlid that does not sleep. It helps us not to suffer from micromanagement, to see the full picture of processes in the company, to collect metrics and to give insights. We sign a contract, put the product in place, and then the client benefits. For example:

— complete financial analytics through time tracking

— through standups and status checks, teams stay focused and fix problems. You can read the problem block in standups through the dashboard and notice the pattern across all teams and all projects

— extremely distributed teams can be formed. All work is recorded in pull request, artifacts, which are automatically transferred to Enji.ai

— it becomes easier for managers to manage multiple projects. They can clearly see who, where and in what is busy, how much time and budget is spent on a certain task. Who of the team is performing the most and who is close to the burnout stage. At what stage is it worth fixing processes and which ones are already fine-tuned

— if the team follows the processes during the working day, no one needs to make up a report afterwards. Enji.ai writes it for you according to the artifacts left behind

— the CFO, customer, project sponsor, and funder can see in real time how much a team, project, feature or even a task costs. In the era of expensive money, this becomes important.

Target audience

Assume that you are a company founder in the midst of software development. What would your worst nightmare look like? Tasks get derailed, deadlines are burning, and the team is constantly in a time crunch, and everything goes downhill. No one is immune to this.

To prevent this from happening and sleep sweetly at night, reasonable questions arise: «How do we track the progress of teams?», «Why are there problems?», «What is going on in the tasks in general?», «Where are we spending money?» and, finally, «How to increase profit?». Finding the answers will help our product.

The mission of Enji.ai is to help companies that are engaged in teamwork in the field of software development or digital to adequately grow, develop and not lose their performance.

Currently we help:

— large enterprise companies: to increase the efficiency and transparency of software development departments

— T&M service companies: optimize processes and improve the quality of work

— companies developing their own products: improve the quality of development, make it more transparent and efficient.

For all customers we offer two options: either we put our product on-premise, that is, inside the customer's perimeter, or in our cloud. And we also provide support and help the client achieve their goals through our product together.

Incubation programs

Recently, Enji.ai has been an active participant in accelerator programs of various scales. Cool insights that transform our vision and work are coming out of the horn of plenty.

Enji.ai was selected from 200 companies to participate in the Better Future AI accelerator program. It is run by Dutch venture capital firm DOMiNO Ventures. 10 startups were selected from different parts of the region, including Georgia, Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, and Azerbaijan. We represented Kyrgyzstan.

We participate in Star Venture from EBRD. This is a program that helps promising startups, gas pedals and advisors to unlock their full potential. Startups are provided with individual consultations, master classes from experts from Cambridge IfM Engage and help to find investors interested in the early stages of business development.

Enji.ai was also a finalist in the Unicorn From KG program from the High Technology Park of the Kyrgyz Republic. Through this program, I had the opportunity to study at Draper University in Silicon Valley. One of the highlights of the program: I was able to present Enji.ai to Tim Draper, a legend in the US venture capital business.

We also participated in the UniCorner program, which was created and developed with the help of Accelerate Prosperity in Kyrgyzstan and the Kazakhstan business incubator MOST Business Intelligence.

Most recently, our team represented Enji.ai in BakuID. This is a large-scale event for startups in Central Eurasia. We presented our product to an investor syndicate with a total investment pool of $1 million.

Enji.ai made it to the top 20 startups of the Startup World Cup Central Asia festival. We were selected from 112 companies. There are four startups from Kyrgyzstan at the top.

Difficulties

The main difficulty is that we are still in the process of self-determination. Intuitively, we already had a vision of what Enji.ai is. But it has not yet been possible to give it a clear shape, what we are and what problems we solve. So far we are moving in the right direction, but we have not docked at the shore.

There is a basic message on our website and in the product presentations, but in our opinion it does not yet fully convey the full scope in a clear and concise format.

Do not be afraid of this, because as you develop, the context will transform. The main thing is to keep track of new meanings and present the product to experienced people who can guide and highlight weaknesses.

The second difficulty is finding people for the right positions. The product is complex, and the market is not easy. Several areas intersect here at once: service and product development, consulting, and support. It is not easy to find a team that really wants to do it and likes to do it. Remember that the main value is the people behind the product. That is the only way to get things on track and moving. We have managed to gather like-minded people and workaholics who are passionate about their business. There are more than 20 employees in the team at the moment. This is a real victory.

Achievements

The most important achievement is that the entire Mad Devs is currently under the management of Enji.ai. Most production decisions are made based on data from this product. I have no idea what would happen if we turned Enji.ai off. We would probably slow down a lot in processes and fall back to 2016.

It is good to see that our client list is gradually expanding. Among them are development service companies that Enji.ai helps with developer management and management decisions. I can not help but mention that we put Enji.ai at Cluth.co. It has been a fascinating journey, which we will talk more about in a future case study. Subscribe to Enji.ai's Telegram channel — there is more of what is going on with the product.

Also, Enji.ai has entered into a memorandum of understanding with Guide, a pre-accelerator from Malaysia. Guide helps startups in the very early stages of development. And we will help them track the progress of the startups they are working with on software development. Getting to experience working with startups in this way is cool.

Plans

At the moment, we are focusing on sales. In dreams we see telecom, banking and public sector, other enterprise companies using Enji.ai to increase the efficiency of the development team. But selling the product itself is not the main part of the mechanism. We also sell our expertise and are as interested as possible in getting the client to start getting real value.

A small teaser: we are actively developing Enji Copilot. It is an AI bot that will continuously learn from internal data from development teams. You can actively interact with it to help with focus, blockers, and predicting problems for engineers.