Startup Spotlight: Hakkiri and their plan to boost business agility

Nearly every company is prioritizing developer productivity and developer experience but improving or measuring either can often be difficult. Enter Hakkiri, a startup on a mission to bring Continuous Clarity to organizations doing Agile development. Hakkiri is part of the MongoDB Startup Accelerator, MongoDB’s initiative to help startups grow by providing free Atlas credits and support from the MongoDB team. We spoke with Hakkiri co-founders Robert Orefice and James Smith to learn more about their Continuous Clarity platform, how they’re using MongoDB Atlas to save time on database management to focus on building their app, and how they’re leveraging the MongoDB Startup Accelerator to scale their business.

Read more about how Hakkiri put MongoDB Atlas to work in How MongoDB Atlas Helps Hakkiri Deliver Continuous Clarity to Agile Software Organizations.

Tell us a little bit about Hakkiri

Hakkiri was founded with the belief that an organization’s processes and tools should accelerate and elevate, not burden and box in. We share a common passion for building thriving organizational cultures with the hallmarks of high levels of morale, learning, ownership, and accountability that fuels great outcomes for the business.

Having both served in senior leadership roles in Agile software organizations, we have first-hand experience in solving many of the pervasive problems in product development, including endless process debates, large investments in Business Intelligence initiatives that yield few actionable metrics, and an inordinate amount of time spent on providing status reports to stakeholders. If these problems are not addressed properly, they can start a vicious cycle of increasing waste, lowering morale, and declining performance, which is toxic to your culture and business outcomes.

Using Agile methods, we recognized the powerful benefits of Continuous Integration and Continuous Delivery (CI/CD) in getting high-quality software to customers faster and shortening feedback loops. But we observed that Agile delivery isn’t realizing its full potential because we are missing the Continuous Clarity needed to make informed tradeoffs between time, scope, and priority when they can be the most impactful.

Our Continuous Clarity platform provides that visibility and is the product we always wished we had to manage our own organizations. It works by harnessing the digital exhaust from teams working in their existing tools, like Jira, so stakeholders get the situational awareness they need while teams stay focused on delivering.

What difference has MongoDB made to your performance?

MongoDB Atlas has worked fantastically for us. As a startup, we need to prioritize our time. Having a robust and secure database system is critical to our business success and Atlas has taken ~95% of that load off of our shoulders while keeping us confident that we’ve got a strong infrastructure and security posture.

How does MongoDB work for you?

Our Continuous Clarity platform has rich BI and visualization of Agile Delivery data. Software teams are utilizing an increasingly diverse set of tools and we aspire to integrate with all of them. We come from a financial technology background of building real-time trading systems. And, much like you want to monitor the financial performance of your stock portfolio, businesses need the ability to monitor the performance of their product portfolio delivery. They need to understand how progress is being made towards strategic investments so they can make informed decisions on scope and priority.

We process in near real-time the digital exhaust of teams working stories in ticketing systems. Those stories, and the epics they belong too, are easily tracked across teams using our concept of Deliverables. All this activity is tracked in time-series and aggregation pipelines calculate summaries efficiently at each level (issue/epic/team/deliverable/programs — coming soon).

What’s the biggest impact that using MongoDB is having to your business?

The biggest impact is the increased productivity of our small team and how Atlas has taken a whole class of work off our plate. This enables us to spend more time building our application and gives us more time to work on the things that matter. It’s a multi-dimensional win.

How do you work with MongoDB, Inc.?

We are part of the MongoDB Startup Accelerator which we can’t say enough great things about. Relative to other companies that may offer discounts for early-stage startups (which we appreciate), MongoDB pulls out all the stops and is committed to making it a partnership. The Atlas Credits are so crucial for startups like us that are bootstrapping the funding and gives us the freedom to iterate on the design for a period of time before it hits our wallet. We are in frequent contact with Allie Tsuchiya from MongoDB, who has been unbelievable in the level of attention and support we’ve gotten. She has connected us with so many others within the company who are ready and willing to support us as well. It goes a long way in building trust in the company, which has us planning to utilize more of MongoDB’s products and features.

Thank you so much. Anything else you’d like to share about Hakkiri?

Absolutely! We would encourage anyone who’s struggling to get the visibility they need to check us out at hakkiri.io. Our Jira integration is easy to setup and we offer a 30-day free trial. It can run side-by-side to an existing set-up, so it’s quick to get going and low risk to see how it compares to what you currently do. This enables potential clients to see for themselves how our Continuous Clarity platform puts status and performance information at their fingertips. It’s helping startups and established firms make informed decisions to maximize value delivery.

The truly exciting part for us is that we’ve just scratched the surface of what we can do. We’re aggressively executing on our roadmap that moves into portfolio and program management, new integrations, deeper analytics and additional metrics. We’re excited to have a great partner (and client) like MongoDB as we head down that road!