Build Vs Buy: The Engineering Productivity Platfrom
As someone who’s spent over a decade working closely with engineering leaders — and now building for them — I’ve seen a familiar pattern play out at large product companies time and again:
An ambitious team of 1,000+ developers hits a bottleneck in delivery speed, quality, or satisfaction. The instinct? Spin up an internal team to build a developer productivity platform from scratch.
I get it. You want control. You’ve got data. But what starts with good intent often ends with wasted quarters, frustrated engineers, and very little actual improvement.
Let’s talk about why building internal engineering efficiency tools is almost never the right move — and what leading teams at Freshworks, HighRadius, AvidXchange, and others are doing instead.
Why Do Engineering Leaders Choose to Build?
The logic seems sound:
- “We have talented engineers”
- “We know our systems best.”
- “We can customize everything.”
- “It’ll be cheaper than buying.”
But in reality, building your own engineering analytics tool is like launching a startup within your org — without dedicated PMs, designers, support, or a roadmap.
The Hidden Costs of Building Developer Productivity Tools
Here’s what usually happens (and rarely gets talked about):
🛠 Resource Drain
our most talented engineers get pulled away from building products to maintain internal dashboards, pipelines, and ETL jobs. Their focus shifts from core product to plumbing.
⏳ Delayed Visibility & Opportunity Cost
While you're still building, months pass without clarity on PR review cycles, planning accuracy, or team bottlenecks. Months without visibility mean months without addressing crucial issues.
📉 Weak Adoption
Spinning an analytics solution using visualization tools such as Tableau doesn’t cut it. We need purpose built tools, with a lot of features that would bring in the right adoption and desired outcomes. Internal tools often lack the behavioral nudges and rituals that drive lasting change. Most of them are limited to scripts that power up the execs on a quarterly basis, not a tool that everyone in the company can use and bring in change management. People don’t use what doesn’t help them work better.
⚙️ Ongoing Maintenance
After launch, these tools require upkeep. But there’s no dedicated owner — and platform teams are already stretched thin. No successful project that’s being used and adopted, ends with a one time build.
💸 Shallow ROI
Without the scale, benchmarks, or UX of a real product, internal tools often underdeliver. No industry benchmarks, no dedicated enablement, and limited evolution compared to a specialized platform.
Engineering leaders must weigh speed, cost, and ROI when choosing between building internal tools or buying platforms like Hivel.
Hivel vs Internal Tools vs Generic BI: A Comparison
Let's look at how dedicated SEI platforms stack up against building it yourself or trying to force generic BI tools.
Why Teams Are Buying Hivel Instead
Let’s be blunt: If you have 100 to 2,500 developers, buying is the better decision 9 times out of 10. Here’s why Hivel wins and why focusing engineering effort on core product acceleration is critical:
Based on public data, Digital.ai (~$244M revenue, 294 engineers) is operating at ~$829K per engineer. That’s 36% below the top quartile ($1.3M) for companies in your revenue band. This makes it even more important to focus engineering effort on core product acceleration — not on building internal tooling that Hivel can deliver from day one.
⚡ Fast Time-to-Value
Be up and running in days — not quarters. No need to delay roadmap priorities or spin up a new team.
📊 Benchmarked Engineering Metrics Out of the Box
From DORA to SPACE, get visibility into delivery, quality, and satisfaction metrics — plus how you compare to peers.
📈 Real ROI, Real Fast
- Freshworks: 16% more features shipped
- Uniphore: 17% faster release cycles
- Conga: 42% reduction in time spent coding
- ShipRocket: 22% reduction in production bugs
- JULO: 93% drop in unreviewed PRs
🧠 From Dashboards to Daily Workflows
Hivel provides Playbooks that Work – with nudges, rituals, and actionable insights embedded directly into engineers' daily tools like GitHub, VSCode, and Slack. Hivel doesn’t just tell you what’s wrong — it helps you fix it.
🛠 Built for Engineers, by Engineers
Unlike Tableau or PowerBI, Hivel is designed to fit directly into the developer lifecycle — not just sit on a dashboard that only the CTO looks at. Hivel drives continuous improvement across every level — from engineers to EMs to leadership — with aligned insights and workflows. Dashboards just for the CTO won't move the needle; they end up as static reports.
🤝 Proven. Practical. Plug-and-Play.
Companies who tried to build now use Hivel. Why? Because our platform just works — and keeps evolving with you.
What’s Next: The Future of Engineering Productivity with AI
We're not stopping at just providing metrics dashboards. Hivel is built for the future of engineering:
🧪 Copilot & Cursor Impact Analytics
Measure how AI dev tools like GitHub Copilot and Cursor are affecting your velocity, PR quality, and team performance.
🤖 AI Code Review Engine
Automatically analyze PRs, reduce reviewer fatigue, and cut manual effort by 80%. Faster reviews, better quality, less grunt work.
Your ROI Isn't in Building Tools. It’s in Shipping Product.
You hired engineers to build your product — not rebuild data pipelines or maintain flaky dashboards.
Before you spin up a cross-functional squad and invest 1,000+ hours in internal tooling…
Ask yourself this:
What if you could get there 10x faster — without building a thing?
Let’s talk. Worst case, you leave with clarity. Best case, you unlock a new level of engineering efficiency.
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