Exathink Research

Dr. Krishna Kumar
Founder & CEO

Improving Product Development Flow with Data

Our mission at Exathink Research is to help clients maximize the customer value delivered by their software product teams. Our research driven advisory practice helps software companies implement programs that continuously improve product development flow using granular data to drive decisions at every level: team, middle management and executives.

We can help you

  • Create delivery processes that reduce the time to value while improving product quality
  • Build a sustainable delivery culture that aligns software teams with customer and company goals

Despite being the beating heart of a multi-trillion dollar sector of the global economy, it is astonishing that there are still very few ways for software teams to make economically critical decisions to improve delivery processes using hard data.

We aim to fix that.

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Our Philosophy

Value Driven
Factor user and customer value into engineering decisions
Economically Tangible
Measure value in terms of economically tangible quantities
Forensic
Use data to identify root causes and improve outcomes
Empowering
Support teams with data and tools to improve processes from the bottom up
Humane
Never compromise team trust, safety or health in achieving outcomes

Media Appearances

Dr. Krishna Kumar
Founder & CEO
Nearly 30 years of making software products as engineer, manager and CTO.  Leads advisory practice helping clients build continuous improvement programs for their product teams. Finally putting that CS PhD to use developing Ergonometrics™ and building Polaris.

The Two Headed VSM Monster: Culture and Metrics

A chat with AllStacks CEO and  Co-Founder Hersh Tapadia on the growing importance of Value Stream Management in the software industry and the opportunities and challenges this poses.

Agile Tools: Making Things Worse?

A talk given to the Enterprise Agile Global Community meetup in the Summer of 2023. It talks about the technical ideas that underpin our advisory practice and also practical implications such as understanding the impact of tooling on flow.

7CTOs x DevLake: Getting Data Driven Engineering Right

In this session, we team up with our partner 7CTOs and community members Bryan Finster and Krishna Kumar to dive deep into DORA, Dev-Data, and how to translate engineering insights and dev-data into meaningful outcomes.

DORA Metrics, Value Streams, and the Three Ways of DevOps

A chat with the Apache DevLake team on measuring DORA metrics from systems data. The challenges, pitfalls, when to do it, and when not to do it.

Maximize Software Productivity

A round table discussion with Mike Watson, Ron Lichty and Mickey Mantle.

Although it predates the McKinsey Kerfuffle by a couple of years, our fundamental position of measuring productivity has not changed much. It is: focus on improving your systems so that people can be productive, and dont spend too much energy trying to measure productivity.