Stackr builds developer workflow tooling for engineering teams. Their platform sits between the code and the release: environment management, dependency tracking, and deployment sequencing for teams that ship fast and cannot afford configuration drift slowing them down.

By the time they came to Velocy, Stackr had a product their users loved and an internal planning process that had not kept pace with how quickly the company was growing.

The board was green. The goals were not.

Stackr ran their engineering sprints the way most dev teams do. Two-week cycles, a groomed backlog, daily standups, and a board that told you what was in progress. On paper it looked like a well-run team. In practice, goals were slipping.

Ryan Ochoa, Co-Founder, described a pattern that had become hard to ignore: "We were closing tickets every sprint. But the things we actually needed to ship kept getting pushed. The board looked healthy and the roadmap kept slipping."

"We were closing tickets every sprint. But the things we actually needed to ship kept getting pushed. The board looked healthy and the roadmap kept slipping."

Ryan Ochoa, Co-Founder

The problem was structural. Their tool tracked tasks. It had no way of telling the team whether those tasks were moving anything that mattered. Work accumulated around the edges of goals without ever finishing them.

Starting with the outcome.

Velocy changed where planning started. Instead of opening the backlog, Stackr's team started each cycle by defining what needed to be true when the cycle ended. The tasks followed from that, generated specifically to serve the outcome rather than pulled from a list of things that had accumulated over time.

"The first time we planned a cycle that way, we cut the task list in half. Half the things we had been planning to do had no clear connection to what we were trying to ship."

Ryan Ochoa, Co-Founder

Planning sessions that had previously run 90 minutes were finishing in under 20. The decisions that used to happen in a room were now made upstream, before anyone opened a task list.

Release cycles shortened by 40%.

The result that stood out most was cycle time. Stackr tracked the time from goal creation to the last piece of work shipping. In the six months before Velocy, their average was just under eight weeks. In the six months after, it was four and a half.

Ochoa was measured about the reason: "We did not start working harder. We started working on fewer things that were all pointed at the same outcome. The release was always possible. We were just getting in our own way."

"The release was always possible. We were just getting in our own way."

Ryan Ochoa, Co-Founder

Blockers stopped living in standups.

For an engineering team, a blocker is rarely just a delayed task. It is a dependency that ripples. One blocked environment configuration holds up three engineers. One unresolved API decision delays a release branch. In Stackr's previous tool, those blockers were only as visible as whoever owned them chose to make them.

In Velocy, a blocked task surfaces next to the goal it belongs to. The team could see what the delay was costing in real time rather than finding out about it when the sprint review revealed another missed target.

"Blockers used to come up in standup after they had already cost us a day or two. In Velocy they showed up the moment they happened, in context. That changed how fast we dealt with them."

Ryan Ochoa, Co-Founder

What changed.

Stackr did not restructure their team or change their release cadence. They changed where decisions got made and what the work was organized around. Goals first, tasks second, blockers visible in context.

For a dev tooling company whose entire product is built around removing friction from engineering workflows, running their own planning through Velocy felt like a natural extension of how they already thought about work.

"We build tools to remove friction from engineering. Velocy did the same thing for how we run the company."

Ryan Ochoa, Co-Founder