Enji.ai — a startup that tracks team performance

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

How It All Began

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

Thus, a Slack bot named Comedian was created for writing stand-ups. This is not about humor at all, as it might seem. In different projects and departments, teams used it to write short reports on what they were doing, what had already been completed, and what blockers existed. Over time, we discovered an important thing: this is convenient for processes — one, and it is convenient for analytics — two. We remembered and internalized this.

In 2018, I was invited to Bangkok to conduct a technical audit of a large e-commerce company in Thailand. There, I was shared an interesting thought that I remembered for a long time: “Oleg, in all the companies we invest in, we collect a lot of metrics. And software metrics — either it exists, or it doesn’t. Its quality doesn’t matter, because software is always crap”.

Once again, I was clearly shown that a tool was needed to streamline software development processes and help collect quality data.

Then came the times of the pandemic, when we were all sent home. Remote work became not a whim, but a necessity. The demand for process transparency and the collection of all significant metrics increased, so that companies could stay afloat. Thus began our journey to create Enji.ai.

Enji.ai is a team lead that never sleeps. It helps avoid suffering from micromanagement, see the full picture of processes in the company, collect metrics, and provide insights. We sign a contract, install the product, and after that, the client receives benefits. For example:

— full financial analytics due to the tracking of working hours

— through stand-ups and status checks, the team does not lose focus and records problems. You can read the problematic block in stand-ups via the dashboard and notice patterns across all teams and all projects

— you can form extremely distributed teams. All work is recorded in worklogs, pull requests, and artifacts, which are automatically transferred to Enji.ai

— it becomes easier for managers to handle multiple projects. They clearly see who, where, and in what is busy, how much time and budget is spent on a specific task. Who from the team performs the best, and who is close to burnout. At what stage processes need to be fixed, and which ones are already streamlined

— if the team follows processes throughout the workday, no one needs to make up reports later. Enji.ai writes it for you based on the artifacts left behind

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

Target Audience

Imagine you are a company founder in the midst of software development. What would the worst nightmare look like? Tasks are missed, deadlines are burning, and the team is constantly under time pressure, and everything is going down the drain. No one is immune to this.

To prevent such things from happening and to sleep sweetly at night, reasonable questions arise: “How to track team progress?”, “Why are there problems?”, “What is actually happening with the tasks?”, “Where are we spending money?”, and finally, “How to increase profit?”. Our product will help find answers.

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

Currently, we help:

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

— service companies working on a T&M model: optimize processes and improve work quality

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

For all clients, we offer two options: either we install our product on-premise, that is, within the client’s perimeter, or in our cloud. 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 acceleration programs of various scales. Like a cornucopia, great insights pour out, transforming our vision and work.

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

We are participating in Star Venture from the EBRD. This is a program that helps promising startups, accelerators, and consultants unlock their full potential. Startups are provided with individual consultations, master classes from experts from Cambridge IfM Engage, and help finding investors interested in early-stage business development.

Enji.ai also became a finalist in the Unicorn From KG program by the High Technologies Park of Kyrgyzstan. Thanks to this program, I had the opportunity to undergo training at Draper University in Silicon Valley. One of the bright events of the program: I managed to present Enji.ai to Tim Draper, a legend of the US venture business.

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

Very recently, our team represented Enji.ai at 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. From Kyrgyzstan, four startups are in this top.

Difficulties

The main difficulty is that we are still in the process of self-definition. Intuitively, we already had a vision of what Enji.ai is. But giving it a clear form, what we are and what problems we solve, has not yet been achieved. We are moving in the right direction, but we have not yet docked at the shore.

On our website and in product presentations, there is a main message, but in our opinion, it does not yet fully convey the entire scale in a clear and concise format.

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

The second difficulty is finding people for the right positions. The product is complex, the market is not simple. Here, several areas intersect at once: service and product development, consulting, support. It is not easy to assemble a team that truly wants and likes to do this. Remember that the main value is the people behind the product. Only then will everything fall into place and start moving. We managed to gather like-minded people and workaholics who are passionate about their work. The team currently has more than 20 employees. This is a real victory.

Achievements

The most important achievement is that the entire Mad Devs is currently managed by Enji.ai. Most production decisions are made based on the data from this product. I can’t even imagine what will happen if we turn off Enji.ai. Probably, we will significantly slow down in processes and throw ourselves back to 2016.

It is pleasing that the list of our clients is gradually expanding. Among them are service companies in the field of development, for whom Enji.ai helps with managing developers and making management decisions. I cannot fail to note that we installed Enji.ai in Cluth.co. This was an exciting journey, about which we will tell in more detail in a case study in the future. Subscribe to the Enji.ai Telegram channel — there is more about what is happening with the product there.

Also, Enji.ai signed a memorandum of understanding with Guide, a pre-accelerator from Malaysia. Guide helps startups at the earliest stages of development. And we will help them track the progress of startups they work with on software development. Gaining experience working with startups in this way is cool.

Plans

Currently, we are focusing on sales. In our dreams, we see telecommunications, banking, and government sectors, other enterprise companies using Enji.ai to increase the efficiency of the development team. But selling the product itself is not the main detail of the mechanism. We also sell our expertise and are maximally interested in the client starting to receive real value.

A small teaser: we are actively developing Enji Copilot. This is an AI bot that will constantly learn from the internal data of development teams. You can actively interact with it so that it helps with focus, blockers, and predicts problems for engineers.