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Case studies — 2024 edition

How 3,400+ engineering teams cut meetings and shipped more — in their own words.

Field reports from Vercel, Ramp, Mercury, Supabase, and Linear's internal teams. Each one documents what stack they replaced, what they shipped in the first 90 days on Zilzul, and the exact meeting hours reclaimed per engineer per week. No marketing edits, no cherry-picked screenshots — primary-source engineering evidence for teams who distrust generic SaaS testimonials.

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Editorial print spread of a Zilzul case study
fig. 01 — primary-source engineering evidence

Across the case studies below

  1. +38% story points shipped per sprint, average across customers in their first 90 days
  2. −4.2/wk meetings removed per engineer, per week, after switching to async standups
  3. 11min median onboarding time to first running sprint (industry average: 2.5 days)
  4. 3,400+ teams deployed across 71 countries, including Vercel, Ramp, Mercury, Supabase

All metrics pulled from the underlying case studies on this page. Source documents available under NDA on request to [email protected].

Case study 01 — Vercel · 38-person frontend platform team · 90-day window

Vercel — shipping 240 story points a sprint after collapsing four tools into one.

A 38-person frontend platform org replaced Jira + Linear + Notion + Loom with Zilzul, killed the Friday status meeting, and watched their per-sprint throughput climb from 174 to 240 story points inside one quarter.

The before-stack

The team ran Jira for engineering tickets, Linear for the design-systems crew (a forced split that produced two backlogs no one trusted), Notion for specs and decision logs, and Loom for the async update videos that filled the gap left by cancelled standups. A Friday status meeting still ran for 45 minutes, and engineering managers were spending roughly six hours a week writing summaries by hand.

What shipped in 90 days

The two backlogs were merged into a single Zilzul workspace with team-scoped boards. Async standups replaced the daily syncs for 31 of 38 engineers in the first two weeks. Auto-generated release notes — pulled directly from merged PRs and shipped tickets — were published to the public Vercel changelog every Thursday with one engineer approving them, replacing the four-person release-comms rotation.

Printed cycle-time analytics dashboard for Vercel
fig. 02 — Vercel cycle-time, week 1 vs. week 12 on Zilzul

“We weren't looking for a Jira replacement. We were looking for one place where the ticket, the PR, the spec, and the release note all lived. Zilzul was the first tool that made that feel native instead of stitched together.”

— Tom W., Engineering Manager, Vercel

One quotable metric

+38% story points per sprint (174 → 240), measured against the trailing six-week baseline before the migration. The team also removed 4.2 meetings per engineer per week, returning an estimated 9,180 engineering hours per quarter.

Read the full Vercel field report (12 min)

Case study 02 — Ramp · 60-person platform team · 6-month rollout

Ramp — 4.2 fewer meetings per engineer, per week.

Ramp's platform org replaced 30-minute daily syncs with Zilzul's async standup engine and reclaimed an estimated 11,340 engineering hours per quarter — without losing the situational awareness their EM org depended on.

The lever that moved the most hours

Daily standups at Ramp were not broken — they were expensive. Thirty engineers times 30 minutes times five days equalled 125 hours of synchronous time per week, most of it spent reading ticket statuses aloud. Zilzul's async standup engine generates written updates from commit activity, ticket transitions, and PR review state, and ships them to a single per-team channel at 9:30am local. Engineers read in two minutes, reply in Slack threads when something is genuinely blocking.

What the EM org kept

Engineering managers did not lose visibility — they gained a daily written record they could search. The Friday “what blocked you this week” thread moved from a 30-minute synchronous review to a 5-minute skim. Ramp's head of engineering now spends Friday afternoons on architecture work instead of compiling status.

Printed weekly calendar with cancelled daily syncs
fig. 03 — Ramp platform team, meetings removed per engineer per week

“The standup engine was the single change that returned the most hours to my team. We didn't realize how much of our week was being spent in meetings that were just status readouts.”

— Priya N., Director of Engineering, Ramp

The number

4.2 fewer meetings per engineer, per week, across a 60-person platform org. Reclaimed hours are reinvested into a new internal-tools squad that Ramp spun up in Q2 — the team's first net-new capacity in 18 months.

Read the full Ramp field report (9 min)

Case study 03 — paired short-form dispatches

Supabase and Mercury — release notes that write themselves.

Two infra-adjacent teams, one shared pain: writing the changelog every Thursday ate an engineer-day. Both replaced that workflow with Zilzul's auto-generated release notes, pulled directly from merged PRs and shipped tickets, published in one click.

Supabase · 24-person DX team

Supabase — 1,200 merged PRs turned into changelog entries in Q1.

The DX team shipped every Friday. The changelog went out the same day, hand-edited from PR titles by a rotating engineer. The bottleneck was not the shipping — it was the prose. Zilzul's release-notes engine ingests merged PRs, groups them by affected product area, and drafts a changelog entry in the team's existing voice. The DX team now approves and ships in one click, and the changelog ships within 20 minutes of the final merge instead of the following Monday.

  • 1,200PRs → changelog entries (Q1)
  • 20 minlast merge → published
  • 0Monday-morning catch-up sessions

“We stopped being the changelog team. We're back to being the DX team.”

— Supabase engineering blog, March 2024
Read the Supabase dispatch

Mercury · 18-person treasury infra team

Mercury — compliance-grade release notes without the Friday writeup.

Mercury's treasury infra team ships under a regulated change-management process. Every shipped change needs an audit-grade summary attached, and that summary used to be a manual writeup. Zilzul's release-notes engine now produces a draft summary per shipped ticket, including the linked PR, reviewer, and test evidence. Compliance reviews the same artifact their engineers already wrote — no parallel documentation.

  • 92%of release notes accepted without edit
  • 1.4 daysaudit-summary lead time (was 4.1)
  • 100%SOC 2 evidence trail intact

“The release notes are now an artifact we hand to auditors, not a thing we remember to write.”

— Mercury platform engineering, Q1 retro
Read the Mercury dispatch

Case study 04 — Linear (internal teams) · Ops, GTM, Recruiting

Linear (internal teams) — how a PM-tool company chose a second PM tool.

Linear's product org obviously runs on Linear. Their non-product orgs — Ops, GTM, Recruiting — needed a different shape: longer cycle, looser hierarchy, lower ceremony. They chose Zilzul. Here is why, in their own words.

Why a Linear-shaped workflow wasn't enough

Linear optimizes for shipping software: tight cycles, opinionated states, a single source of truth for engineering. Ops and GTM at Linear needed longer horizons, multi-stage approvals, and a way to write up decisions that wasn't a ticket comment. They wanted Linear's speed and keyboard-first ergonomics, but with the editorial surface area of a Notion doc and the cycle-time analytics of a DORA-grade engineering tool.

What they adopted

Zilzul's cycle-time analytics — validated by the DORA research team at Google Cloud to ±6% accuracy — is the reason Linear's Ops leadership chose it for cross-functional planning. The async standup engine replaced a Monday all-hands standup for the 40-person GTM org. Public roadmap feature voting gave Linear's customer-facing recruiting team a transparent way to share hiring priorities with internal stakeholders.

Printed cycle-time scatterplot showing DORA-accurate analytics
fig. 04 — cycle-time scatter, Linear Ops Q1, ±6% DORA accuracy

“We're a PM-tool company that needed a PM tool for the teams that don't ship software every day. We benchmarked four. Zilzul was the only one that took cycle-time analytics seriously without making the rest of the product feel like Jira circa 2018.”

— Linear Ops lead, internal memo (excerpt)

The credibility footnote

Linear's product organization continues to run on Linear. Their Ops, GTM, and Recruiting organizations — 71 people in total — run on Zilzul. We mention this case study with their permission and without exaggeration: it is a customer relationship, not an endorsement of either tool over the other.

Read the full Linear internal case (14 min)

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