Project
GitKraken.dev - portal for dev leads
Development leaders struggle with limited visibility into what their teams are building, where bottlenecks occur, and how engineering work aligns with business priorities. Without this clarity, decisions rely on anecdotal updates, blockers go unnoticed until it’s too late, and scaling processes leads to inefficiencies and burnout. GitKraken.dev is designed to help solving these and pushes towards making data-informed decisions.
Timeframe
Started in 2024 and still developing project - we were tasked with building a functional MVP under tight time constraints.
My role
Sole designer working on UI/UX closely with developers, PMs and stakeholders along with creative director.
Process
Supported development team with design assets and modifications and also overall design guidance.
Outputs
Provided a style guide, assets and UI/UX explorations based on business goals and user needs.
Better visibility allows leaders to prioritize resources toward the highest-impact work and avoid wasted effort. It directly improves ROI of engineering time — a scarce resource. With strong process visibility, leaders can spot and address risks early (before deadlines slip or product launches get blocked). Process visibility provides leaders with quantitative insights (DORA metrics, velocity trends, developer satisfaction signals). This makes decisions more defensible and aligned with organizational goals.
A lot of similar services already exist on the market (LinearB, Graphite, in-app dashboards in all domains) for smaller businesses the cost of these is pretty high, but there is interest in using it. Our stakeholders decided to make our own product by acquiring several services to save backend resources, combining them in one service and making these more user-friendly and part of one ecosystem. Our PMs and PMMs decided that the most value for dev leader will bring 2 things: Automations and Insights.
As it was a new product and developers already started development when I joined, I dedicated time to building initial components for them to move faster and be able to build initial things like auth flow and settings pages for managing teams.
Every week we had UX demos where I showed designs and prototypes, user journeys and we discussed with developers and PMs how we can adjust our vision and plans to deliver MVP as fast as possible. It was part of our approach – to engage engineers on early stage as we are building product for engineers.
At first we integrated the automations flow of the acquired product CodeSee by adopting it to our design system and guidelines. It was first opened for all users but then it was gated to only paid subscriptions.
But some time after the launched we checked the automations telemetry, and it turned out that the % of people creating automation after seen initial screen for the first time was low. So I worked together with PM to improve this metric. I suggested and designed automations templates idea so user needs to add manually minimum of information. As well as improved condition filter - the old one got two big because of constantly added new options, so groupings were now presented in a better way. These efforts led to a 2x more automation creations overall.
Another challenge I have to deal with was adding UI/UX updates to the AI automations which could create much more interesting flows (for example detecting possible complexity based on files addressed - auth flows, etc.) We covered several options including prompts of possible cases but landed on a more simple option with dropdown not to make the overall page too big. Also I highlighted the text field with gradient frame to show that this specific condition is AI based.
GitKraken has a partnership with software intelligence platform to be able to provide valuable DORA and other metrics to help development leaders to evaluate their decisions. We designed and built a flow for making this accessible for different teams - they can adjust and use it in many ways.
Insights part is rapidly evolving and shaping, but the team got already a lot of positive signals and companies enrolled. We continue to brainstorm, evaluate on best metrics, ways to show trends, alerts and other valuable information.
As I was sole designer in this project, the expectation was that I work on several directions at the same time - administration part and exact developer features. And then came one more thing - redesign of the whole domain to unify all the existing GitKraken products. But our team managed to deliver everything in a very short timeframe and surpass expectations.
The project is continue to evolve based on further user feedback, telemetry and our own ideas and improvements.
Thank you for reading!
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