3
 min read
August 19, 2022

How Mobile Premier League uses Klaar to increase productivity

Sharthok Chakraborty
Co-founder

Table of contents

Reimagining, from the ground up, how tech teams can be managed to deliver maximum outcomes

CHALLENGE

MPL’s Engineering, Product, and People Leaders had one persistent challenge - they were struggling to understand if the tech teams were optimally staffed and with the right tech talent. Additionally, it was a major challenge to figure out if people had the bandwidth to be more productive.

OUTCOME

Within a month of launch, Klaar enabled MPL tohave a real-time end-to-end visibility of talentutilization, performance, productivity, 360 feedback,and existing skills. This data helps MPL to figure outthe optimum staffing for each team, to seamlesslyswitch people between pods, and to hire only whenneeded.

MPL, the gaming unicorn, at a glance
MPL, the gaming unicorn, at a glance

A TIME CONSUMING PROCESS

MPL is in a growth phase. Their customer base is expanding daily and their product is continuously evolving. But this high-growth rate comes with its own challenges.

Seerat Ghuman from the People Strategy & Development team says,

“Before Klaar, we were spending hours every week over calls with Engineering and Product leaders to get a sense of the real-time talent allocation on the ground that is linked with objectives and tasks. Then we had to spend more time to manually update multiple complicated excel sheets.”

Needless to say, it was extremely labor-intensive and prone to human errors.

Ranaq Sen, who leads People Tech & Analytics for MPL, adds

"Our focus here was on data accuracy. Usually people insights is the next logical step. It was a very comprehensive report that took a long time to generate and present because it included so much data.”

TO HIRE OR NOT HIRE

When Engineering Managers raised requests to hire replacements or fresh talent, the PeopleTeam had no way of validating if these asks were justified. This led to back and forth discussions and further highlighted the need for understanding talent utilization and productivity.

Ranaq Sen, AVP, People Analytics sharing the challenges

And finally, if a candidate was actually hired, the decision to allocate them in particular teams needed to be more aligned with the team’s present performance and engagement statistics. On average, MPL was spending 20+ hours every month on this process.

END TO END VISIBILITY

When MPL originally decided to go ahead with Klaar, they were really looking to replace those tedious excel sheets and allocate talent on a digital platform that enabled them to have a clear line of sight on org-wide talent utilization.

Since Klaar integrates with Jira, where the work actually happens for MPL’s tech teams, the Engineering and Product team managers found it extremely intuitive and easy to start adding role and capacity estimates on Klaar. Depending on roles and access, the Engineering, Product, and People Team leaders finally had a real-time view of the talent allocation and utilization for the entire department and all of the teams within.

Seerat Ghuman, on how Klaar has reduced the time taken for People Teams

A PROACTIVE, DATA-DRIVEN PROCESS

MPL was quick to realize that that Klaar could also be used to actually understand the productivity of teams and individuals and solve the hiring conundrum via intelligent recommendations. That’s when MPL started linking their goals, OKRs, and 360 feedback to the tech and product teams on Klaar.

Ranaq Sen describing how Klaar empowered MPL to increase productivity

MPL started leveraging a data-driven, proactive process, that saved them time and money.

HOW QUICK WAS ADOPTION?

Seerat Ghuman describing how Klaar was adopted fairly quickly

What immensely helped in adoption was how important updates reached the leaders in real-time and how productive the weekly reviews became.

UP NEXT

As MPL completely moves to a pod based structure and starts leveraging Klaar for all of the other functions, we just wanted to say that we love being a part of MPL's growth journey!