Clarity, trust and autonomy for remote Dev Teams
How CDQ's remote-first engineering teams use Swarmia to gain clarity without control - fueling autonomy, better conversations, and a healthier balance of time spent on product development.
At CDQ, we’ve always believed in giving our engineering teams the freedom to focus on what matters: building great software for our customers. But as a remote-first organization, spread across Europe, creating a shared sense of visibility and alignment across teams was a challenge.
Micromanagement? Not an option for us.
But we sure needed a better way to understand where teams were spending their time, spot roadblocks early, and enable engineers to do their best work without breathing down anyone’s neck.
We tried a few things (including the usual Jira hacks), but they never really stuck.
Then we found Swarmia.
Swarmia gave us something we’d been missing: clarity without control. We started small, with just two volunteer teams, so everyone could get comfortable. And right away, people saw that this wasn’t a fancy cover for policing work or tracking performance, but a genuine way to give teams more ownership and visibility into their own processes.
What surprised me the most was how this transparency actually fueled autonomy.
Within a few weeks, our DevOps teams were having better conversations - about priorities, bottlenecks, and how we can improve together. Swarmia’s investment balance view revealed we were only spending about 38% of our time on product development.
We set a goal to reach 50–60%.
And guess what: we’ve already hit it.
The impact went far beyond the numbers. Teams own their priorities. They challenge decisions with data. And engineers work more independently and with so much more confidence. It’s a wonderful thing to see.
Swarmia’s real-time insights, working agreements, and Slack notifications became part of our daily rhythm, not just another tool gathering dust. It made conversations easier, planning smarter, and collaboration smoother across the company. Even our Head of Product starts his day by checking the Swarmia summary - it’s naturally become a simple but powerful habit.
Next up, we’ll be diving deeper into flow metrics to better understand what slows us down and how we can collaborate even more effectively. For me, using data to guide decisions is essential in building effective, autonomous teams that deliver real value: people first, supported by smart tools.
At the end of the day, building a remote-first engineering culture where people feel trusted and supported is what drives us forward. Tools like Swarmia help us do exactly that: making work more transparent, more connected, and, frankly, more human. And that makes all the difference.
If you’re exploring ways to bring more clarity and autonomy to your engineering team, dive deeper into the technical details of how we use Swarmia on their blog.
About Swarmia
Swarmia is a software engineering intelligence platform for modern organizations. It gives engineering leaders, managers, and teams visibility across three key areas: business outcomes, developer productivity, and developer experience.
