Story
Why we built Deckgauge — and why we’re giving it away
By the CodPal team · Engineering intelligence & CTO-as-a-service
CodPal is a CTO-as-a-service firm. Every few weeks, one of us steps into a new company as its (often fractional) CTO — and the first job is always the same, and always the hardest: understand what’s really happening in engineering, fast. Not the version in the status deck — the real one. Where delivery stalls, which teams are overloaded, who’s quietly stuck, and whether the roadmap matches reality. Deckgauge is the tool we built to answer those questions in days instead of months. Today it’s open source, and this is the story of why.
Every company is a different puzzle
No two engineering orgs run the same way. Some live in Jira, some in Azure DevOps, some in GitHub Issues; some had Monday.com on top, and some tracked work in nothing but spreadsheets and memory. As a fractional CTO you inherit all of it at once — work scattered across tools, no single source of truth, and a leadership team that wants answers in your first week. You can’t spend a quarter reading wikis. You need the picture on day one.
Day one: one board over everything
So we built boards that sync Jira, GitHub, GitLab, and Azure DevOps into one place. However each team happened to work, we pulled it together into a single Monday-style board — grouped, owned, status-tracked, and effort-sized. For the first time in an engagement, everything the company was building sat on one screen, in one shape, no matter which tool it came from.
Find the bottlenecks — and the people who are struggling
A board tells you what; the engineering intelligence dashboards tell you how it’s going. DORA metrics, cycle time, work-in-progress, review pickup time, and rework rate showed us exactly where delivery was getting stuck — and the org tree showed who was carrying too much and who had gone quiet. That last part matters: the goal was never to rank people to blame them, but to find the engineers who needed help so we could actually give it. This is the diagnosis a good CTO needs before touching anything.
Turn data into aligned meetings and roadmaps
Data only helps if it changes the conversation. We used the boards to run organized planning meetings with each team — agreeing on the work ahead against something real, not a slide — and we used auto-generated roadmaps, built straight from live board data, to present a credible plan to management. Scattered tickets became a timeline leadership could see and trust.
CTO-as-a-service value, in no time
With this deck in hand, CodPal could deliver real feedback and value from week one instead of month three. The tool compressed the slowest, most uncertain part of every engagement — “what am I even looking at?” — into a few days. That speed is the whole promise of CTO-as-a-service: senior technical leadership that pays for itself immediately.
Why we’re sharing it with the world
Here’s the thing: almost every engineering manager faces the same fog we do — multiple tools, no single view, and pressure to explain delivery to the business. We didn’t want to keep that advantage to ourselves. So we made Deckgauge open source and uncapped: deploy it in your own stack, connect your tools, and read your own numbers. The more managers who use it and benefit from it, the better.
Deploy Deckgauge for free and connect your first source in minutes. If you’d like a hand turning what it shows into action, we offer a Deckgauge Engineering Health Check — a fractional CTO reads your dashboard and hands you a one-page assessment plus your top three fixes — and for larger orgs, an Enterprise plan with SSO, governance, and support.