Case Study - Trainline improves engineering productivity
and quality with Plandek insights

The Challenge

Trainline is Europe’s leading train and coach service booking app. They have over 1000 employees, with around half of that being in technology alone. Director of Engineering at

Gary Stevens

Director of Engineering

"Plandek was a great fit for us culturally. We wanted a tool that made engineers feel that it was there to help them with problems rather than feel like it was measuring them as individuals."

5/5 stars

Trainline, Gary Stevens, joined us to share their journey into adopting a Software Engineering Intelligence (SEI) tool – what they were looking for, their goals, and most importantly, how they’ve been able to achieve them.

Why Trainline decided to use an SEI tool:

1. To get a better understand of engineering issues before they arose, rather than after the fact. They wanted to be more proactive in spotting things and understand how to make teams more productive long-term.
2. They wanted a tool there to feel like it was helping engineerings to solve problems, rather than purely for management.
3. To provide tools to engineering teams to understand the things they can do in their delivery processes that would tangibly change their productivity.

The Scope

Trainline chose Plandek as their SEI platform, as it was a great fit for them culturally. Plandek allows them to create reporting and dashboards around the engineering outcomes in their teams – they have the ability to drill down into that information and build out their own use cases of what’s working for them.

Similarly to many organizations we work with, Gary shares that Trainline’s starting point for looking at a SEI platform was the DORA metrics.

“The DORA metrics were a great way of getting people used to the idea of how productivity can be measured. DORA was great for looking back across the entire organization at a quarterly level, but what we really wanted to do was help teams understand the things that they can do in their delivery processes that really tangibly change the speed of their productivity.”

While DORA is a great starting point for any business looking to move towards a more metrics-led culture, it doesn’t take long for to start getting curious about other metrics available to gain deeper delivery insights.

“Plandek has allowed us to create more bespoke measurement and allow teams to look at the things that really matter to them and the things that they think they can drive that will have a material impact.”

Trainline have built their own custom dashboards to focus on the metrics that matter most to teams, and continue to expand their use of other key delivery metrics in Plandek.

The Outcome

Gary Stevens

Director of Engineering

"Plandek has really allowed us to mature the conversation about productivity and quality. It's now a regular part of all meetings we have, and we're able to give stakeholders broader confidence in how we're performing as an engineering function."

Despite some initial concerns around how teams may feel about having a SEI platform like Plandek, Gary shares it’s been a huge success:

“When we started rolling Plandek out, the early feedback we got from teams was incredibly positive. They really felt like the information was meaningful, they really felt like it represented the work that they did and gave them insights into the things that matter most to them.”

Since adopting Plandek in Trainline, their engineering teams have been able to have more mature conversations around productivity and quality, with a greater understanding of how to influence it.

Final Thoughts

Gary shared with us an unexpected benefit of Plandek that was not on the initial list of requirements, but provided an added bonus for Trainline – an improvement in the quality of conversations Trainline engineering leaders can now have with non-engineering leaders across the organization.

“We’ve been really able to demystify what was once previously a really complex engineering process and really break down the stages of work that happens in any technology organization. That’s allowed us to focus on things like the non-engineering effort, whether that’s story refinement or planning, and really tell a story about how vital that time is spent in our development processes and really build a better conversation around what it means to build good product software.”

Plandek’s Customer Success team continues to work closely with Trainline to help teams and leaders get the most out of using Plandek on a regular basis, to gain deeper insights and further increase productivity in teams.