Introducing Pulse: Enhancing Digital Product Delivery at Studio Graphene

In my last blog post, I introduced Telsen, our first step into designing and developing our own products at Studio Graphene - an advanced digital food safety platform that has allowed us to explore our ability to innovate and diversify from delivering services. Now, I’m excited to share Pulse, a game-changer for how we measure the delivery of digital products for our clients.

Pulse marks a significant shift for us as a company, broadening our focus on building tools that enhance our own internal capabilities. It’s our second internal product after Define, a platform developed to provide transparency and accountability across the digital product journey. While development on Define has been paused, its purpose remains to help teams and stakeholders align on requirements, objectives and real-time project progress. Pulse, however, takes our internal processes to the next level, focusing on optimising delivery efficiency and quality. It’s not about generating revenue but about creating something that enhances our capability to deliver exceptional digital products for our clients.

Pulse was born from our commitment to creating the best environment for building digital products. As our teams expanded across multiple geographies, we recognised the need for a solution to measure key performance metrics, set benchmarks and drive continuous improvement. This platform helps us maintain and elevate the standards we set for ourselves and has been developed through a collective effort across all teams, ensuring that every project we deliver meets our clients' needs effectively.

Initially, we considered licensing existing tools to manage these metrics. However, most solutions on the market are tailored for individual product teams or single organisations - not digital product agencies like ours that handle multiple, concurrent client projects. In addition, many of these tools only addressed narrow aspects of delivery, focusing on specific engineering metrics without accounting for the holistic approach we take. At Studio Graphene, quality goes far beyond any single metric, it’s a combination of factors, including rigorous testing standards, engineering excellence, precise estimations and efficient product management. 

Recognising that no off-the-shelf solution met our requirements, we decided to create one that did. Given our standardised workflows and internal tools, it made sense to build something tailored to our teams and ways of working. Pulse allows us to track key performance indicators across all aspects of product delivery, ensuring we can measure and optimise everything from defect reopen rates to code quality. This approach lets us address challenges with greater precision instead of relying on disconnected tools that fail to offer a complete picture.

Our experience in building digital products was invaluable in shaping Pulse. We analysed data from previous projects to identify the most important metrics for improving our processes. For example, we found that high defect reopen rates were a significant indicator of inefficiency. By focusing on these high-impact metrics and recognising that even monitoring them consistently reveals bottlenecks, we’ve been able to zero in on where improvements are needed most. Additionally, with such great access to our user base, we spent considerable time on user research before development. Through numerous interviews and workshops, we gained a clear understanding of user pain points and requirements, which helped us define a targeted, effective MVP.

One of the biggest technical hurdles we faced was integrating data from various platforms like GitHub and Jira. Extracting the right information, processing it accurately and drawing meaningful insights demanded sophisticated technical solutions. The complexity of creating algorithms capable of interpreting this data in a way that provided actionable insights into productivity and quality added another layer of challenge to the process.

Operationally, the task of determining which metrics to prioritise emerged as another challenge. With a multitude of potential data points to track, it was essential to focus on those that would deliver the greatest impact. We needed to ensure that the metrics we chose aligned with our broader goal of enhancing efficiency and quality across all teams.

Pulse is designed for those directly involved in delivering digital products - product managers, engineers and QA analysts. It also offers value to stakeholders such as business or project sponsors, who are directly impacted by the efficiency and quality of digital product delivery. These roles were chosen because they are most invested in the outcome of the product development process and benefit significantly from the insights Pulse provides. At its core, Pulse measures and improves productivity and quality, empowering teams to set benchmarks, identify areas for improvement and make data-driven decisions that continuously optimise the delivery team’s performance.

Balancing the development of Pulse with our core client work proved to be a considerable complexity. While our primary focus remains on delivering for clients, we recognised that investing in Pulse was crucial for improving our internal processes. To facilitate this, we established a dedicated core team for Pulse, insulated from client work, ensuring uninterrupted progress even during busy periods. Additionally, a flex team was implemented to shift between Pulse and client projects, allowing us to maintain momentum on both fronts. Leadership of Pulse is spearheaded by Peter, one of our Senior Product Managers, who has set clear quarterly goals and remained focused on achieving them, with his dedication and vision proving critical to the success of Pulse so far.

Currently, Pulse hasn’t been rolled out to paying customers, and that’s by design. Our primary focus is on using it internally to enhance our delivery outcomes in terms of both productivity and quality. We initially piloted the product on a few internal projects to fine-tune its functionality, gathering essential feedback on which metrics were most valuable to track. As we expand its use across more teams within Studio Graphene, we will continue to incorporate input on user experience and ease of use. This feedback will be crucial for making continuous improvements, especially as more teams and clients begin to engage with Pulse.

The success of Pulse so far reflects the collaborative effort of everyone involved. From engineers to product managers, every role has played a part in making Pulse the robust tool it is today. We’ve achieved significant milestones, including widespread internal adoption and initial integrations with client GitHub accounts. Moving forward, our focus will be on expanding its features and refining metrics to deliver even greater value to our teams. By enhancing Pulse’s integration with client GitHub accounts, we aim to deepen insights and further elevate our delivery processes.

Our north star has always been user engagement because ensuring that people regularly use Pulse is a key indicator that they’re truly gaining value. To keep improving, we’re actively listening to feedback and our roadmap is dedicated to addressing user insights. Alongside expanding the metrics available on Pulse, we're exploring AI and machine learning solutions to harness the vast data we collect. By drawing connections across metrics and data sources, we aim to uncover deeper insights and understand the root causes of issues, meaning we reach even higher standards of excellence and deliver increased value to our clients.

As we look ahead, our priority is for Pulse to continually deliver valuable insights that enhance efficiency and quality in our digital product delivery. With each new project feeding data into Pulse, we can draw fresh insights that highlight opportunities for improvement, essentially enabling Pulse to evolve alongside our needs. This cycle of feedback and enhancement allows us to refine Pulse’s functionality and our internal results are already promising. We've seen an 80% reduction in average wait times for peer reviews, 8 out of 10 developers find Pulse helpful in their role and over 90% of our developers are using it monthly.

Thanks for reading - Ritam Gandhi, Founder of Studio Graphene.