Case Study: Blinkist runs an IC-led engineering organization with Swarmia

Blinkist runs a 30-person engineering org without managers with Swarmia

Blinkist, a learning platform with over 28 million users, faced a challenge in proving the efficiency of its engineering team to leadership and later needed to maintain operational visibility after making the bold move to remove its entire engineering manager layer. The CTO, Sebastian Schleicher, turned to Swarmia's engineering intelligence platform to automate visibility and create a trusted, single source of truth for engineering work.

By implementing Swarmia, Blinkist gained automated, data-driven insights into its engineering operations. The solution provided reliable data on initiatives and work patterns, which replaced manual status updates and enabled their unique IC-led organizational model to function. As a result, leadership gained a clear understanding of where engineering effort was going, and the team was able to ship faster without the overhead of traditional management. Swarmia delivered these results without being used for performance management, ensuring trust from both engineers and leadership.

Blinkist