About OpenZeppelin

Founded in 2015, OpenZeppelin is the world leader in securing blockchain applications and smart contract systems. Their open source Contracts Libraries serve as the industry standard for smart contract development, and their open source tools, like Relayer, Monitor, and UI Builder, helps teams build and operate projects faster and more safely. OpenZeppelin secures over a thousand blockchain protocols and organizations, including Coinbase, Ethereum Foundation, Uniswap, Aave, and DTCC. Managing this scale requires exceptional engineering operations across multiple blockchain ecosystems while maintaining the rigorous security standards the industry depends on.

The Challenge

When metrics become noise instead of signal

Daniel Carmo, Director of Libraries & Tooling at OpenZeppelin, faced a challenge familiar to many technical leaders: too much data, not enough relevant data and not enough insight. The team used a combination of planning tools to track resource allocation and project status, but these tools only told part of the story.

"We knew the project assignments, deliverables and individual tasks" Daniel explains. "But that didn't give us concrete, updated and actionable, information on how we were performing at engineering level, nor did it give us a broader - holistic - view of general inefficiencies or bottlenecks in our processes.". This informational gap created blind spots that made it difficult to identify small issues before they became bigger problems.

Adding to the complexity, OpenZeppelin's engineering organization had grown organically from startup roots. GitHub teams had been created ad-hoc as needs arose, and while this flexibility had served them well in the early days, it now created fragmentation. Daniel needed a way to bring clarity to this complexity and establish meaningful metrics that would help managers make better decisions.

The Solution

Measuring what matters: engineering throughput over vanity metrics

When evaluating engineering analytics platforms, Daniel focused on finding a solution that could answer one fundamental question: how much are we actually getting done? After implementing Weave, OpenZeppelin established an approach to engineering visibility.

Rather than tracking every possible metric, Daniel worked with his team to identify four core KPIs that would serve as their north star: average output per engineer, code turnover, PR cycle time, and bug ratio. These metrics were chosen specifically because they measured actual engineering delivery rather than proxy indicators.

"If we increase code output, lower bug ratio and code turnover, automatically we'll see an increase in effective throughput per engineer," Daniel notes. This focus on outcomes rather than activities helped the team avoid the trap of optimizing for metrics that looked good on paper but didn't reflect real productivity gains.

Weave's implementation at OpenZeppelin follows a rhythm designed to drive action, not just observation. Team data is reviewed weekly. Regularly, this data and dashboards are discussed with the managers of each team, drilling down into the metrics and extracting specific action items, where needed.

The team made a deliberate choice to focus on team-level metrics rather than individual tracking. While Weave provides individual contributor dashboards, Daniel sees delivery and performance as more of a team level activity - "I don't want to go too much on the individual side unless there's clearly a problem there," he says. "I believe it is more efficient to stay at team level."

The Results

Four weeks of engineering time recovered, and a new way to communicate value

The impact of Weave became clear within weeks of implementation. By analyzing output data, Daniel identified a concerning pattern in one of the projects. The metrics showed significantly lower output than expected, prompting immediate investigation.

"We were able to detect one problem that was lurking in one of the projects due to data in Weave that was way lower than expected," Daniel recalls. The early detection allowed the team to address the issue before it cascaded into a major problem. "It probably saved us 4 weeks of engineering time.” 

Beyond operational improvements, Weave transformed how OpenZeppelin communicates engineering value to other stakeholders. By making it easy to aggregate and correlate several streams of data, consolidating it into meaningful dashboards, it became easier to present more precise, clear and up-to-date information, based on data and less on “feeling”.

"Now we have metrics to see what's happening. We were able to show that we are going on the right path in terms of AI utilization and, what matters even more, engineering delivery."

— Daniel Carmo, Director, OpenZeppelin