Drata: “Our team saves 1 to 2 hours per engineer each day with Unblocked”

September 17, 2024

With solutions like automated security control monitoring, evidence collection, and risk management, Drata saves customers time and money that’s traditionally spent on maintaining a healthy compliance program. It’s no wonder Drata is growing rapidly—in just 3.5 years, they’ve added over 5,000 customers. But with all this growth has come challenges, especially for the engineering organization.

As Drata expanded to support more than 200 integrations and over 20 compliance frameworks, not to mention a globally dispersed engineering team that scaled into the hundreds, documentation became fragmented across many platforms. It was taking developers far too much time to hunt down answers and resolve conflicting information.

Distinguished Platform Engineer David Knell tapped Unblocked to bring the same sort of efficiency to Drata’s engineers as Drata’s product brings to their customers. The impact has been profound. David estimates that “our team saves 1 to 2 hours per engineer each day with Unblocked” because engineers can self-serve their way to reliable answers to questions about code.

Before: Dispersed knowledge and resources

Before Unblocked, valuable knowledge about code and processes at Drata was spread across several places, ranging from source code docs to Slack channels.

Developers found it challenging and time-consuming to navigate the important details of the code they were working with. Every new task began with a deep dive into tools like Notion and Jira, and often involved reaching out to other team members through Slack and meetings to gather insights that weren’t easily accessible. With an engineering team distributed across multiple time zones across the globe, obtaining answers could lead to delays in projects.

Having information in various locations also ran the risk of creating misunderstandings or misalignments. David recalls an instance where two teams were working on projects with overlapping components: “Each team was referencing different sets of documentation and had slightly varied interpretations of the requirements. This resulted in different implementations that weren’t aligned until later in the process, leading to delays and additional work to bring everything together.”

“Unblocked has improved our productivity and consistency across the board. The return on investment has been evident in the time saved and the reduced frustration among the team.”

David Knell — Distinguished Platform Engineer at Drata

After: A single, reliable source of truth

When David learned about Unblocked through an article on The New Stack, he was ready to try something that could centralize information, improve efficiency, and provide consistent answers for everyone on engineering.

From the start, the engineering team found it much easier to find answers about code and process simply by asking Unblocked questions. Unblocked not only searches across the dozens of tools used at Drata to compile relevant answers, but it also links directly to the references it consults, making it easy to more deeply explore a topic. Unblocked even helps developers in Slack, responding directly to questions when it has a compelling answer.

In addition to saving each developer at Drata an hour or more a day, Unblocked also adds value on the project level. Because it provides up-to-date answers from dynamic sources, like explaining the status of a compliance-related task in Jira, engineering managers have found that issues get resolved faster, tasks are completed sooner, and projects go more smoothly.

“Many engineers have mentioned they spend far less time on repetitive tasks and searching for documentation, allowing them to focus more on coding and solving complex problems,” David says. As a result, developers at Drata report increased satisfaction with their work, an important factor in helping the company retain high-performing talent.

Speaking of talent, Unblocked has unlocked another improvement at Drata that wasn’t even the team’s primary motivation: onboarding takes 30% less time. On top of that, there’s additional time saved by the teammates of new hires enduring fewer get-me-up-to-speed pings and meetings. One new developer “was able to contribute to a critical project with minimal hand-holding in the first week, a significant improvement over previous onboarding experiences,” David says.

A little effort, a big payoff

Just as with Drata’s compliance solutions, integrating Unblocked to source code and other internal tools pays off handsomely. “If you’re dealing with dispersed teams or frequently face issues with inconsistent information, Unblocked can make a huge difference. Take the time to properly integrate it into your existing workflows to get the full benefit,” David recommends (Take a look at our docs to see supported integrations.)

With Unblocked, Drata has quickly leveled up its engineering efficiency. “Unblocked has improved our productivity and consistency across the board. The return on investment has been evident in the time saved and the reduced frustration among the team,” David says.

Get in touch with us today to see how you can get the same results, and more, for your team.