Want to build happier and more effective teams?

In 21 days you can understand exactly how your Product and Engineering teams work and think. In doing so, you'll remove the stress and anxiety from your product delivery, increase your teams' output by at least 10%, and fix your highest priority team engagement problems. All this with near zero admin effort on your part... Think that's impossible? Read on 😉

Join some of the best companies already using Upside

  • Company Logo -  Crowdcube
  • Company Logo - Seedrs
  • Company Logo - Azimo
  • Company Logo - Tandem
  • Company Logo - Indeed Flex
  • Company Logo - ChillieBean

The Secret to building happier and more effective teams

Upside's co-founders have built, run, and been part of over 100 product and engineering teams at companies of all sizes and types.

These include blue chips, decacorns, unicorns, growth-stage with product-market fit, early-stage fighting for survival, and the world's leading creative agencies. Regulated, unregulated, B2B and B2C.

We've worn all the different hats as: engineers, designers, product managers/owners, agile coaches, line managers, executives, and founders. We've tried many different agile approaches and team formations and you know what... There is no secret. It's mostly just a matter of:

  • Using real-time performance and engagement metrics that are actually meaningful.

  • Getting everyone at the company (management, team leads, and the team members themselves) to look at, understand, and discuss those metrics.

  • Fostering a culture of continuous improvement so 'weaker scoring' metrics are iteratively improved.

It's as simple as that. We guarantee that if you follow this 3-part formula you'll have brilliant, engaged teams and stress free product delivery.

Sadly, as with most things, getting the right systems in place and maintaining consistency is easier said than done.

The Challenges of building and maintaining happy and productive teams

  • It's difficult to accurately understand how well your teams and their people are performing.

  • You don't really understand how your team feels. You're not even quite sure what specifically to ask them.

  • You don't understand precisely where the teams can improve. When you make changes, it's hard to know if you're actually improving or not.

  • Different stakeholders within the company aren't using the same data to judge the teams' performance. And trying to bring all the different data into one place is really painful! This makes it difficult to reach shared conclusions.

  • Your teams and their people don't feel like they can work how they want in case it hurts their career. Whether that's saying no to attending meetings or clocking-off early for family time. There's always pressure to be seen to be working, especially when remote.

  • Frustrations sometimes boil over within your teams or between departments. People clash in unproductive ways. It's difficult to spot and fix issues before this happens.

  • You keep losing your best people as you don't know when they're unhappy. You're then having to spend time hiring and onboarding someone new. Not to mention the thousands spent on recruitment fees.

  • Your teams fear speaking up to the wider business in case they're seen as  being "negative". Things don't seem to change even when they do speak up.

  • Teams keep missing delivery targets. It's difficult to understand why and whether it was avoidable.

  • The teams have too many daily distractions. Many still do not understand the critical importance of uninterrupted maker time.

  • Teams are asked to change what they're working on too frequently by stakeholders.

  • There's a lack of trust between the wider business and your teams. They think product and engineering is a black box and that can lead to unfair criticisms. This creates insecurity and distracts. It often feels like your people are on different sides.

  • The teams are often blocked by external stakeholders and this isn't getting fixed by those who can influence.

To build a successful product and engineering organisation you need to solve all of these challenges, continuously, forever. And if you don't then the stress creeps back, productivity declines, and people leave.

This is hard. It takes a lot of work. But it’s also incredibly rewarding. When you build and maintain teams that get loads of work done, are appreciated by the wider business, and who love their roles. It's magic.

If there really even is a "secret", it's building a SYSTEM that automatically collects insights on how your teams and people are performing and feeling and then ensures the whole company sees this data.

Instead of thinking static team reports and surveys, you want to think of team insights as a machine. A machine that automatically understands how all your teams work and feel, shares those insights with everyone at the company, and helps you and everyone else focus on exactly where to improve.

Upside is that machine and it's taken us nearly two years to build.

Better Inputs

Upside uses real-time data from Jira, Github, and our own Smart Checkins, which are built using the latest in Organisational Psychology via our collaboration with Dr. Simmy Grover (University College London).

Better outputs

Upside provides insights on proven workflow metrics such as Velocity Trend Analysis, Cycle and Lead Time, Branch Cycle Time, Deployment Frequency, and many more.

We wrap our Insights Engine in a beautiful user experience that all of your stakeholders can use and understand. Whether you run one team or hundreds of teams, Upside makes it easy to see how every team is performing and feeling, so you get insights, can take action, and continuously improve.

Free 21 day Benchmark Challenge

You'll begin your journey with Upside on our free 21 day Benchmark Challenge.

We have successfully taken 10 companies through this challenge to date and have seen performance improvements of up to 75%.

With Upside you can...

ASSESS your teams

See where your Teams are great and where they need to improve

As part of your 21 day free trial, you’ll have a complimentary call with Upside where we’ll do a complete product and engineering team check-up... It will instantly show your teams' working habits, where they are great, and clear areas to focus on improving.

- Simply connect Jira and Github, let Upside crunch the numbers and understand your working habits using the metrics that are proven to lead to business success.

- Upside will visualise all of these as easy to understand charts, along with trend analysis, and clearly highlight where you can improve.

- We'll discuss how your teams' compare against other companies so you get a good feel of your current level.

- We'll build a prioritised improvement plan live on our free Discovery Call and how you can use Upside's charts to confirm whether these improvements are working.

Performance boost

Improve your Team's velocity by up to 75% in 12 weeks

Turbo-charge your team's output without lowering quality or risking "metrics gaming".

- Upside allows you to add your whole team to the platform so...

- Everyone sees and understands what the teams' performance dashboard and KPIs look like for themselves, in real-time.

- Get alerted automatically when the team is behind on its core Delivery KPIs, so that an immediate reaction can take place such as cleaning the Test column or completing code reviews.

- Team members get alerted when they are behind on their Personal Delivery KPIs, further deepening their sense of ownership and accountability to the team and wider company.

- Upside's Anti-Gaming Engine adjusts performance expectations based on the historical performance of the team. Inflate estimates? Expectations will automatically adjust.

Team sport

Ensure everybody on the team is pulling their weight

The real-time teammate accountability system.

- Nothing ruins productive teams quicker than free-riders as this study showed. Upside fixes this with...

- The Teammate Course Correct. A single question that cuts through all the noise to arrive at a conclusion - it this person currently a valuable teammate or not. No, OK, let's help them get back on track.

- Ways of Working habits review. For example, do some teammates distract others and reduce 'maker time' unnecessarily?

- Individual performance metrics from Jira and Github. See exactly who your stars are and who needs some extra support (use with care).

- Upside lets you control who sees individual performance metrics. Only those who appreciate the importance of context and reject blame games should see this sensitive data.

Effortless scaling

Scale your product and engineering departments 100% worry free

Upside's Easy Scale ensures your teams don't get too big, new teams hit the ground running, and you don't spend more time 'managing' as the company grows.

- Know exactly when you teams have gotten too big via insights from the average individual output graph.

- Set up new teams in seconds by connecting Jira and Github, so they can self-manage their workflow KPIs.

- 360 Health Check and Leadership Checkins let new teams anonymously communicate out to the wider business to ensure they are getting what they need to succeed such as a clear mission, inspiring leadership, and ownership.

speak up

Ensure your people are engaged and happy in all areas of their work

Upside's Smart Checkins help you understand exactly how your team are feeling and where you can improve their work life

- Checkins are developed in-house and our founders deep industry experience with the latest in academic research. Working hand in hand with Dr. Simmy Grover, an organisational psychologist at UCL, we ask the questions required in order to get the insights you want.

- Topics covered include the 360 health check, Scrum and Kanban ways of working, Burnout, Leadership, and Performance. Everything you could possibly need to understand your people better.

- Checkins are fully anonymous. This ensures you get honest answers instead of them skewing positive. The truth is, no matter how supportive your company, people worry about being viewed as a ‘Debbie Downer’.

- Zero admin. Forever. Checkins completely run themselves. This includes automatic scheduling and dynamically changing which questions are asked in each Checkin so only the questions you need answers to ever get asked.

- Even the best teams can improve. When there are no obvious issues highlighted by Checkins, you can still choose the 'weakest' of the Checkins and try to improve them. Whilst many teams are great, no teams are perfect.

Easy company alignment

Help your teams' gain the trust of the entire company in 21 days

With Upside you can align everyone around the same team performance metrics, so that your teams' true performance is clearly understood by all.

- Add all of your senior stakeholders to Upside so they can use the platform for themselves.

- Upside provides agile KPI training so non-technical staff understand why certain metrics such as Cycle and Lead time are so important, what they mean, what good/bad looks like, and the simple ways to improve them.

- Provide a single health score so that stakeholders can see how each team is doing with a quick glance.

- Reduce unrealistic management expectations using data such as Velocity Trends, Cycle Time, the Burnout Checkin and Epic Simulations (coming soon).

Boost employee retention

Stop losing your best people for reasons that you can control

Upside’s people retention boosters helps you keep your best people long-term...

- Smart Checkins allow you to proactively manage your people. Find out what's frustrating them before it becomes a major issue and they look to leave.

- Checkins are extremely specific so that you can pinpoint the exact issues that are causing problems for your people.

- Save management time. Auto-scheduled Checkins ask the questions and visualise the results, so any issues are highlighted and you simply focus on how to solve them.

- Upside Solutions Library covers all potential issues. There are simple and pragmatic solutions for all problems that you and your teams might encounter.

- Upside run Daily Solution Sessions so you can work with independent coaches and always arrive at the best solution for your specific situation (Premium and Enterprise Tiers only).

Work the way you want

The whole company can see how the team is performing so there's no more anxiety or worry when it comes to Delivery

Upside's simple freedom framework enables...

- Transparency for all. Upside let's the wider company join the platform, for free, so everyone can see how the teams' are doing. No more sense of a black-box.

- This increases trust, and with it, your bargaining power. If the teams are doing what the company needs i.e. focusing on the right things and getting loads done, then they will naturally be empowered to work on their own terms. Where they work, how they work, and when they work.

- Added to this, Upside measures outcomes not inputs. So say goodbye to face-time, clock-watching, panicking if you don't get into work for 9am (or even earlier!), or staying online to obscene hours. Efficiently get your work done and go live the good-life. Yolo!

- Course corrects. Upside's Checkins ensure the team communicate effectively and if they feel the need to tweak their ways of working you can let each other know. Before it leads to problems.

Time back

End the inefficiencies stopping you from getting your work done

Free your teams to get crazy amounts of work done and still go enjoy their lives

- Measure outcomes not inputs. Upside does not, and will never, measure input. We measure the metrics that matter for business success. Stop your people worrying about nonsense like 'face time' and 'getting in the office for 8.30am'.

- Speak up about the time sinks. Maker-time i.e. large uninterrupted time-blocks are essential requirements for your teams to get work done. Sloppy, unnecessary meetings and fractured days kill maker-time. Checkins let your people speak up anonymously and honestly about whether they feel this is an issue.

Plug and play

The zero admin promise

Upside is a platform that completely runs itself...

- Upside takes ten minutes to set-up. In that time you'll have added all your teams, connected Jira and Github, and unleashed the power of Upside's performance insights engine.

- Upside's Checkins are 100% automated. The Checkins are created dynamically and scheduled by the platform. All you need to do with your teams' is reflect on the results.

- It gives you time back. No more manual report generation or "emergency" delivery meetings. Just clean, metronomic delivery for you and the teams.

The free 21 day "Benchmark Challenge”

Your relationship with Upside begins with your free trial. We’ve shaped this into a 21 day Benchmark Challenge. We've constructed this challenge so you can finally understand exactly how your team work and feel. As part of the challenge you will also have put together, and started, a clear improvement program for your teams. All done with almost no admin effort.

You'll have benchmarked all your teams' performance and understand exactly where they need to improve.

You'll understand exactly how each of your teams feel about their work, the team itself, and their place in company via Upside's Checkins.

Highlighted and quantified your 6 highest-priority issues to address per team.

You'll have built and started implementing a clear action plan for improving those 6 highest priority areas per team. Congratulations, you finally have a culture of data-driven coaching.

You'll have saved 5 hours of your own time in activities no longer done by using Upside e.g. manual reporting and extra 'delivery status' meetings etc.*

*based on a poll from current customers

Revolutionised how you manage your various stakeholders by removing the 'black-box' and letting them self-serve with insights. No more unrealistic targets or unfair criticisms.

Our "Time is Money" Guarantee

The 21 day trial is completely free. So we can't do a 100% money back guarantee... but we wanted to demonstrate our total confidence that Upside will help your company.

So at the end of the 21 day challenge, if you believe that signing up to and using Upside has been a genuine waste of your time, we will literally pay you the value of the time that you've invested into Upside back. Time is money after all and if you're not happy, we're not happy.

But we'll only refund your time investment if you start and complete the 21 day challenge. That means adding Jira, Github, and running a Checkin for your teams.

Why? Because we are limiting ourselves to onboarding 5 companies per week to maintain the highest standard of customer care, training, and our general availability for our Challenge takers. And we only want to work with those who are serious.

And remember, Upside takes less than 10 minutes to sign-up, connect your tools, and fully manages itself from that moment on. So unlike most other tools you'll use, the overall time investment as an administrator is minor.

Packages

At the end of the 21 Day Challenge, if you felt Upside added as much value for you as it did our other customers then you'll move to one of our paid packages

First 50 paying customers get a 25% discount

Essential

£
$12

Per team member/month

No contracts. No surprise fees. Cancel any time.

  • All Workflow analytics via Jira and Github integrations
  • Sentiment analytics via Upside's Smart Checkins
  • Access to Upside’s solutions library
  • 6 months historical data
  • Unlimited viewers

Essential

£
This is some text inside of a div block.

Per team member/month

No contracts. No surprise fees. Cancel any time.

  • All Workflow analytics via Jira and Github integrations
  • Sentiment analytics via Upside's Smart Checkins
  • Access to Upside’s solutions library
  • 6 months historical data
  • Unlimited viewers

Premium

£
$15

Per team member/month

$15 when billed annually or $18 billed monthly.

  • Everything in Essential


PLUS

  • Daily Solution Sessions with our Agile Coaches
  • Real-time support from our Account Specialists in Slack
  • Team Training kick-off sessions

Premium

£
This is some text inside of a div block.

Per team member/month

$15 when billed annually or $18 billed monthly.

  • Everything in Essential


PLUS

  • Daily Solution Sessions with our Agile Coaches
  • Real-time support from our Account Specialists in Slack
  • Team Training kick-off sessions

Enterprise

£
Custom

Contact us

The best option for teams of over 200 Product and Engineering Pros.

  • Everything in Essential
  • Everything in Premium


PLUS

  • Quarterly Performance and Engagement reports per Team
  • Ongoing Team Training
  • Real-time support for all Team Managers and Account Owners
  • Exclusive quarterly meetups

Enterprise

£
This is some text inside of a div block.

Contact us

The best option for teams of over 200 Product and Engineering Pros.

  • Everything in Essential
  • Everything in Premium


PLUS

  • Quarterly Performance and Engagement reports per Team
  • Ongoing Team Training
  • Real-time support for all Team Managers and Account Owners
  • Exclusive quarterly meetups

Limited time Bonus: The first 25 paying customers get up to 4 hours of free 1:1 consulting on methods for increasing team productivity and engagement.

Who's Upside for

Early-stage Startups

You're busy building and people analytics has hardly been a consideration to this point. You've got some money to spend, with care, on adding people to your team.

However you need your new team members to hit the ground running and to demonstrably add value quickly.

You're also keen to stay fully/partially remote, even outside of Covid when life gets back to normal. That means you can't see how people are working first-hand.

So you realise it's now important to start understanding your people more. Both how they're performing and feeling. But you can't spend more time managing them. You just need the data to be automatically collected so you can work with the team on improvements.

In 21 days time... You'll have increased your output by 10%, feel complete confidence of how to add new members to the team and get the most out of their time and your capital, and you'll never spend a seconds thought wondering if everyone is working as hard as they could be to make the company a success.

Growth mode

Your business has exciting traction. Growing DAU's, high retention rates, and maybe even revenue. Whatever you're north-star, you're doing a great job. Awesome! You're now increasing your ambitions and building out your product and engineering organisation to deliver this vision.

But you want to do so with care... You're worried about diluting the company's high performance level, spinning up weaker teams, and responding too slowly to coach struggling new hires.

You also want to make sure your existing people are being effectively manaaged and supported.

You've got a general feeling that your teams perform to a high-level but you can't really quantify it nor can you say exactly where or how they can improve. Neither do you have an accurate sense of how your teams feel and whether you'll continue to keep your best people at the company long-term.

In 21 days time... You'll know exactly what your teams are great at, what they need to work on, and you'll have started to implement your first wave of improvements.

You'll also have have complete confidence in how to effectively scale your teams', immediately spot which team members need more support, and not spend a single extra minute on 'management' activities.

Enterprise

You have a large product and engineering organisation and the company is still trying to understand how best to marry innovation with the business-as-usual side of the underlying business. You're starting, or are in the midst of, an agile transformation or some other big change program.

But you're not really sure if the changes you're making are working at the program level or at the team and individual team-member level.

You don't really know how well all of your teams are performing, and lack a consistent set of metrics on which to assess them.

You want to understand what's on the minds of each team and how they feel about their place in the team and company.

In 21 days time... You'll understand exactly how all your teams and people are performing. And how they're feeling about their role, their team, and what it's like to work at your company.

You'll also have a clear improvement plan for each team that the whole company can understand, support, and which fits within the larger change program.

Who Upside isn’t for

Upside isn't for you if...

You just want Upside to surface performance metrics in order to use the 'stick' more regularly and effectively.

Your company really doesn't care about trying to make your employee's working lives better. Rather, you see your staff as machines and not complex humans with different wants and needs.

You don't really believe in the core agile principles like continuous improvement and sustainable delivery.

As a final, more logistical point, your company needs to use Jira and Github. That said we are adding other project management and code repository tools (like Trello, Asana, Gitlab etc.) in the not too distant future.

Testimonials

Profile Phote

Michael Kent

Founder and Chairman, Azimo

Upside solves a real problem for modern technology companies. It gives effortless transparency on what’s going on in the teams and allows for more timely communications with them if there’s any issues.

Profile Phote

Damian Mitchell

Head of Engineering, Dopay

Upside has helped us spot and solve the core issues and bottlenecks on our teams. We’ve never felt as productive nor had as much trust by the wider organisation.

Profile Phote

Natalie Foster

Scrum Master, Chillibean

Upside is already helping us manage our teams more effectively. I’m also really excited at what’s coming. They involve us, their community, in everything and I love feeding back on their roadmap and designs.

Chris Loizou

Head of Delivery, Crowdcube

Nick  Booth

CTO, Feedr

FAQs

How does Upside work?

  • Create an Upside account.
  • Connect Jira (3 fields, 30 seconds).
  • Choose the boards you want to connect with Upside.
  • Kick back and let Upside run the numbers. We’ll provide our initial health check.

Upside is a platform that helps you boost your teams’ performance and engagement by up to 75%.
We achieve this by generating insights from three data sources and showing where you and your teams can improve.
These are Jira, Github, and our own Smart Surveys that magically asks just the right questions at just the right time. Zero admin required, Upside just works.

How do I get started?

  • Create an Upside account.
  • Connect Jira (3 fields, 30 seconds).
  • Choose the boards you want to connect with Upside.
  • Kick back and let Upside run the numbers. We’ll provide our initial health check.

Do the 21 day Benchmark Challenge, which begins with a 20 minute Discovery Call. Learn more

Do you have a demo?

  • Create an Upside account.
  • Connect Jira (3 fields, 30 seconds).
  • Choose the boards you want to connect with Upside.
  • Kick back and let Upside run the numbers. We’ll provide our initial health check.

The best way to test Upside is sign-up to our 21 day Benchmark Challenge, which begins with a 20 minute Discovery Call. Learn more

Is Upside private and secure?

  • Create an Upside account.
  • Connect Jira (3 fields, 30 seconds).
  • Choose the boards you want to connect with Upside.
  • Kick back and let Upside run the numbers. We’ll provide our initial health check.

Upside does not store, read or access any of your source code or sensitive ticket data. Upside simply pulls down the basic Github and Jira issue metadata. Upside also encrypts data at rest and in-transit and respects the pre-existing permissions users have in each data source we aggregate. We go to great lengths to maintain high security.