How Ona became a 99th percentile engineering org

Ona's engineering team has achieved remarkable productivity, reaching the 99th percentile by leveraging extensive automation, which has allowed them to maintain a high output of pull requests without increasing team size. The key strategy involves automating tasks that do not require human judgment, thus freeing up engineers to focus on tasks that do. Using Ona Automations, the team has systematized their workflow, including planning, execution, and maintaining code quality and hygiene, with automations such as stale pull request cleanup, feature flag removal, and documentation updates. This systematic approach has significantly reduced the time from planning to feature completion, allowing engineers to wake up to new features ready for review. Ona has made these automation tools and methods available to other teams through their Ona Template Library, offering a pathway for other organizations to replicate their success and improve efficiency by automating routine engineering tasks.