About

Checkr is a leading background check platform that leverages advanced technology and AI to help companies make faster, fairer, and more efficient hiring decisions. It streamlines the screening process with solutions tailored for modern workforces, including gig, staffing, and enterprise businesses.

Problem

• Developers faced significant delays in setting up local environments, especially when their work required collaboration across multiple microservices outside of their team domain.

• Shared environments created bottlenecks and conflicts, disrupting workflows and hindering testing isolation.

• The goal was to introduce ephemeral environments that would enable faster setup times, reduce CI/CD conflicts, and enhance developer productivity for complex use cases.

Action

Discovery

The initiative originated from a developer productivity demo showcasing Okteto’s potential to address setup delays and testing isolation challenges. Following my advocacy, leadership approved a pilot program to validate its feasibility and impact. The key objectives were to:

• Validate time savings: Assess whether ephemeral environments could significantly reduce setup time at scale, especially for teams with interdependent services.

• Understand team feedback: Engage pilot teams to identify adoption challenges and validate workflows. Teams included those needing frequent service spins and quality engineering, where testing isolation was critical.

• Demonstrate ROI: Collaborate with the software procurement team to develop a cost-benefit analysis for leadership, highlighting the projected efficiency gains of a full rollout.

• Mitigate risks: Ensure processes were maintainable and easily documented, avoiding overburdening developers with complex configurations.

Execution

I worked closely with cross-functional stakeholders to execute the pilot and evaluate its scalability:

• Pilot Execution: Collaborated with the Developer Productivity team to streamline deployment configurations and ensure developers had the tools and documentation to maintain their own Okteto setups.

• Developer Engagement: Engaged pilot teams in regular exploration sessions, addressing their challenges in real time. Feedback highlighted significant benefits for teams frequently spinning up dependent services and for quality engineers requiring isolated test environments.

• Vendor Management: Partnered with the procurement team to evaluate, purchase, and maintain the Okteto license, presenting a cost-benefit analysis to leadership to secure funding for the pilot.

• Stakeholder Alignment: Leveraged a tech-sharing demo by the Developer Productivity team to build initial interest among engineers, which seeded the pilot group. Coordinated with leadership to secure engineering support for evaluating the program’s feasibility.

Result

• Efficiency gains (Okteto pilot): Teams that adopted Okteto saw a 5x reduction in setup times for complex microservices, with environments running in minutes instead of hours.

• Challenges identified: Despite measurable efficiency gains, the cost and complexity of adoption outweighed benefits for most teams, leading to the decision to pivot to persistent environments.

• Long-term alignment: While the initial effort with Okteto did not pan out, the pilot allowed us to validate our hypothesis without committing to a full-scale launch. This quick validation enabled us to pivot efficiently to persistent developer environments with mock data, which provided scalable solutions for testing separation, reduced CI/CD conflicts, and improved developer productivity.

Key challenges and resolutions

Leadership alignment for transformative change
While initial demos sparked enthusiasm, adoption of Okteto through a grassroots effort proved inconsistent and unsustainable without leadership backing for a broad rollout.

• Resolution: Presented a compelling ROI analysis to leadership, demonstrating potential time savings from reduced setup times against the cost of Okteto licenses. Proposed a pilot group as a low-risk way to validate outcomes and build a foundation for wider adoption.

Barriers to maintenance and scalability
Maintaining configurations for ephemeral environments presented significant challenges, particularly for complex applications. Internal inertia, inconsistent configurations, and perceived vendor instability further eroded trust in the platform.

• Resolution: These insights underscored the need for a more stable and scalable solution. The project pivoted to adopt a persistent developer environment with mock data, providing a simpler and more reliable framework tailored to the organization’s needs.

Lessons learned

• Adoption requires proven reliability in all scenarios
  Developers are hesitant to adopt new tools unless they deliver consistent value across both ideal and edge cases. Even tools that offer clear benefits must overcome the higher bar of trust compared to established workflows.

• Change management is a strategic investment
  Large-scale changes in developer tooling require more than just technical buy-in. Effective adoption demands thoughtful change management to address psychological barriers and ensure widespread alignment, supported by clear mandates from leadership.

• Pilot programs provide crucial validation
  By testing ephemeral environments with a pilot group, we uncovered critical insights into both the benefits (e.g., faster setup times, testing isolation) and limitations (e.g., configuration complexity, inconsistent reliability). This iterative approach mitigated risks and guided a strategic pivot.

• Efficiency metrics are not enough without scalability
  While Okteto offered significant time savings for some teams, the long-term costs and maintenance challenges highlighted the importance of evaluating scalability alongside immediate gains.

• Cross-functional engagement drives success
  Collaborative efforts with the Developer Productivity team, procurement, and engineering leadership ensured that decisions were informed, aligned, and effectively communicated. Stakeholder trust was reinforced through regular updates and transparent decision-making.