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Use cases

TL;DR. PanDev Metrics shines when you have 10+ engineers, care about a data-driven approach, and want answers that Git + Jira alone can't give you. Below are the stories that come up most often in customer conversations — by role and by team size.

When PanDev is the right tool​

The product fits best when two things are true at the same time:

  1. You have at least ~10 engineers and the org is starting to feel like "I'm not sure who's really doing what".
  2. A meaningful share of the work happens in an IDE on a stack we support — JetBrains, VS Code (or its forks Cursor/Windsurf), Visual Studio, Xcode, Eclipse-family.

If both are true, the rest of this page is a useful read.

Stories by role​

Engineering manager — "who is overloaded right now?"​

You manage three teams. Standups give you yesterday's story; Jira gives you who claims to be busy. Neither tells you who actually spent ten hours yesterday in deep code versus who spent two hours coding and the rest in meetings.

What PanDev surfaces for this role:

  • Load by person and team — real IDE hours, overtime, focus blocks.
  • Where work is stalling — long-running PRs, code-review wait time, tickets aging in In Progress.
  • Who's drifting toward burnout — chronic overtime, weekend work, dropping focus minutes.
  • Onboarding curve — new hires' time to first non-trivial PR, ramp from week to week.

The job-to-be-done isn't surveillance. It's "give me numbers I can take to a 1:1 instead of vibes."

CTO / VP Engineering — "what does this org actually do?"​

You're answering to the board, the CEO, or the rest of the leadership team. They want to know: are we shipping?, what does it cost?, what's the trend?

What PanDev gives you:

  • DORA metrics with performance bands. Deployment frequency, lead time for changes, change failure rate, MTTR — across the whole org or sliced by team.
  • Real-time visibility. A live view of who's working on what, across teams, repos, and trackers.
  • Cost per feature. The number you'll actually quote in budget conversations: "this feature cost us $42,000 in engineering time." No other vendor on the market gives you this.
  • Headcount planning grounded in data. Real coding hours plus delivery throughput plus DORA bands together tell you where to add people and where you don't need to.

A common pattern: the CTO uses the platform weekly for trends and drills into the team dashboards ad-hoc for "what's going on with team X this quarter" questions.

Finance / Operations — "what's the unit economics of an engineering hour?"​

PanDev's Finance role unlocks the salary layer. Hourly or monthly rates, USD, per-employee working calendars that override the company calendar, public holidays you set manually.

The numbers Finance gets:

  • Direct task cost — (time on task × hourly rate) + a proportional share of the engineer's unattributed time.
  • Per-project and per-department roll-ups.
  • Retroactive rate changes. Promote someone? Bump their rate? Historical costs recalculate across the entire timeline.
  • XLSX exports for the rest of the finance stack. There's no payroll integration (1C, QuickBooks, Sage, Bamboo) — XLSX is the bridge.

HR — "objective input for Performance Reviews"​

HR uses the platform to ground review conversations in facts instead of subjective impressions. Each employee card aggregates activity, work history, time distribution, and (with the Finance role) salary. The org-structure view shows departments and nested teams the way the company is actually shaped.

The platform is not built to "rank" employees. It supplies the inputs; the org decides what to do with them.

Developers — "give me back the time I spend filling in timesheets"​

For the engineers themselves, the win is automation. The IDE plugin captures real activity automatically — no manual time logs, no Jira-status babysitting just to get credit for work done. Personal dashboards show your own trends; everyone has skin in the game.

The Personal workspace mode lets an engineer run PanDev solo, without a company tenant. Useful for freelancers and for engineers who want their own data to carry between jobs.

Stories by team size​

10–30 engineers — the chaos point​

This is the size where the founder/CTO loses the ability to keep the whole org in their head. The platform installs in well under a day and pays for itself by telling you which one of the dozen things you're worried about is the real problem.

Wins at this size:

  • Spot the blockers (long reviews, idle tickets) before they become quarterly problems.
  • Build the first internal cost-per-feature narrative.
  • Set the first DORA baseline so future quarters have something to compare against.

30–100 engineers — standardization​

At this size, every team has built its own Jira workflow, its own naming convention, its own definition of "done". PanDev gives you a consistent layer above all of that — Git events, IDE events, and tracker events normalized into the same timeline regardless of how a team works locally.

Wins at this size:

  • Cross-team DORA comparisons that aren't apples-to-oranges.
  • Org-wide load balancing — see who's underwater and who's not.
  • A real cost-per-feature dataset, accumulated over a year or two.

100+ engineers — cost-of-feature as a budget tool​

For enterprises, the strategic value is the financial layer. "Project X cost $1.4M in engineering this year and shipped Y features" is the kind of sentence that ends arguments. On-prem deployment usually matters at this size, and PanDev runs in your perimeter on Docker or Kubernetes.

Wins at this size:

  • Cost per feature feeding into capital-allocation conversations.
  • On-prem with LDAP SSO inside your security perimeter.
  • DORA at the org level for the board, sliced by team for ops.

How we compare in a use-case​

A few honest one-liners. Q120 of our positioning guide allows direct naming.

  • vs LinearB / Jellyfish / Faros AI. They all do Git + tracker analytics well. They don't run on-prem, don't have IDE telemetry with our depth, and they don't compute cost per feature. If you don't need any of those three, they're fine choices. If you do, we're the only option.
  • vs Swarmia. Strong product on the team-health side. Same gaps: limited IDE depth, no on-prem.
  • vs WakaTime. WakaTime is a great personal/team time tracker. We're a platform: trackers + Git + IDE + finance + AI, plus on-prem.

When PanDev is the wrong tool​

We'd rather you not buy than buy and churn. We're honest about the misfits:

  • Organizations not built on software engineering. Marketing, sales, ops as the core — PanDev isn't for you.
  • Stacks we don't cover for IDE telemetry. Without the IDE layer, you're paying for half the product.
  • Security / DevOps-only teams. Not enough IDE signal; the dashboards will be sparse.
  • Tiny teams. Below ~5–10 engineers the value is real but the price-versus-overhead conversation rarely works out.
  • Product overview — the wider context and competitive position.
  • Features — the full functional surface.
  • Roles and permissions — which role sees which data: Owner / Admin / Maintainer / Viewer at tenant level, plus the Finance role for cost data.
  • On-prem deployment — installing inside your perimeter.