============================================================ TITLE: Value Velocity: How Remitly Delivers at Scale TYPE: article VERSION: 1 VERSION_ID: 1ea62efc-84e1-4199-aaba-0b71e1d64530 GENERATED_AT: 2026-06-26T07:15:01.922Z SUMMARY: How Remitly realizes engineering effectiveness with Uplevel by addressing challenges early and focusing on value velocity to deliver customer satisfaction. READING TIME: 5 min WORD COUNT: 878 KEYWORDS: How Remitly Delivers at Scale, One immediate return, Stay up to date SOURCE URL: https://uplevelteam.com/customers/remitly ============================================================ KEY TAKEAWAYS: * The problem with green * A stronger foundation for OKR tracking * One immediate return * The next question: value velocity “Value Velocity”: Remitly's Answer to Scale Remitly has built one of the world’s leading global money movement platforms, earning the trust of 9.6 million quarterly active customers to move money across more than 175 countries. With engineers spread across the US, Canada, Poland, and India, Remitly is simultaneously scaling its core remittance business, expanding into new financial products, and navigating two major technology shifts at once: AI and stablecoins. The company runs at a scale where a missed delivery isn't a missed deadline — it's mission critical. And for Ankur Sinha, CPTO, that reality shapes every decision about how engineering runs. The problem with green For years, Remitly tracked engineering progress the way most companies do: OKR owners reported status each month, and leaders made judgment calls about whether things were on track. But Remitly's OKR owners faced a common tracking problem: many goals don't move linearly. A product launching in month three shows zero metric movement in months one and two. Status was green because initiatives felt on track — until they weren't, and the quarter was already closing. "We would find out too late that something was off," Ankur explains, "which meant we had less time to react to it." By the time a quarterly goal showed red, the options were limited — scramble, descope, or miss. The data that might have enabled an earlier intervention simply didn't exist in a usable form. The problem wasn't effort or intent. It was that Remitly had no reliable signal connecting day-to-day engineering activity to likely outcomes. Manager judgment filled the gap, but judgment has limits at scale across a globally disbursed team. The company runs at a scale where a missed delivery isn't a missed deadline — it's mission critical. And for Ankur Sinha, CPTO, that reality shapes every decision about how engineering runs. ## The problem with green For years, Remitly tracked engineering progress the way most companies do: OKR owners reported status each month, and leaders made judgment calls about whether things were on track. But Remitly's OKR owners faced a common tracking problem: many goals don't move linearly. A product launching in month three shows zero metric movement in months one and two. Status was green because initiatives felt on track — until they weren't, and the quarter was already closing. "We would find out too late that something was off," Ankur explains, "which meant we had less time to react to it." By the time a quarterly goal showed red, the options were limited — scramble, descope, or miss. The data that might have enabled an earlier intervention simply didn't exist in a usable form. The problem wasn't effort or intent. It was that Remitly had no reliable signal connecting day-to-day engineering activity to likely outcomes. Manager judgment filled the gap, but judgment has limits at scale across a globally disbursed team. ## A stronger foundation for OKR tracking Remitly worked with Uplevel to close the gap between what teams planned to deliver and what was actually happening on the ground — and to give leaders the foundation to act on that difference. Uplevel automatically connects and compares planned work to actual initiative progress. LLM-based classification links engineering activity — Jira issues, pull requests, branch names, and commit messages — to your actual objectives, without requiring clean issue hygiene or manual tagging first. For Ankur, the goal was giving engineering leaders the ability to spot problems early, have grounded conversations with their teams, and make confident prioritization calls before options narrowed. Uplevel enabled this. "If somebody says green but the initiatives say you're clearly off track, we can inspect deeper," says Ankur. "I now have a data view in addition to a judgment view." Early work focused on calibration — validating that signals accurately reflected what had happened before using them to look forward. That foundation is now enabling a different kind of leadership conversation: not "why did this miss?" but "what do we do about this while we still can?" Early use has been as much about calibration as prediction — teams reviewing historical data to validate whether Uplevel's signals reflect what actually happened. That groundwork is now enabling more forward-looking use: identifying initiatives at risk before they become problems, and reallocating resources while there's still time to act. One immediate return As a public company, Remitly produces quarterly R&D cost capitalization reports for SOX compliance. Previously, engineering managers estimated time allocation in spreadsheets — a recurring process that was both time-consuming and imprecise. For a public company, Uplevel's allocation analysis solves a second problem with the same data. Quarterly R&D cost capitalization reporting — previously a spreadsheet exercise dependent on manager estimates — now runs off activity data Remitly is already capturing. ## One immediate return As a public company, Remitly produces quarterly R&D cost capitalization reports for SOX compliance. Previously, engineering managers estimated time allocation in spreadsheets — a recurring process that was both time-consuming and imprecise. For a public company, Uplevel's allocation analysis solves a second problem with the same data. Quarterly R&D cost capitalization reporting — previously a spreadsheet exercise dependent on manager estimates — now runs off activity data Remitly is already capturing. "The tax cap automation, even by itself, pays for what we use Uplevel for," says Ankur. “It has saved my team hours of work, and my leaders are able to spend more time on strategic initiatives.” The next question: value velocity Remitly has invested in DORA metrics and done well by them. But Ankur has started asking a harder question. ## The next question: value velocity Remitly has invested in DORA metrics and done well by them. But Ankur has started asking a harder question. "You could be in the elite rankings of DORA and still not deliver the value you want to deliver to customers. We can measure velocity on our own — but how predictable are you in delivering that velocity? That's where tools like Uplevel can help." Ankur Sinha CPTO, Remitly He calls the metric he's chasing "value velocity" — not how fast code ships, but how reliably value reaches customers from idea to delivery. It's a harder thing to measure than deployment frequency, and there's no industry consensus yet on how to do it. But for a company where engineering and product are converging, where agents are beginning to write and review code, and where the pace of change is only accelerating, deployment speed is no longer the right proxy for engineering effectiveness. "Code change will become more commoditized," Ankur says. "At the end of the day, you want to care about how many customers used the thing you just deployed. Were they satisfied? What was the quality? That's what we're trying to measure now." For Remitly, the work with Uplevel is directionally clear: get ahead of problems instead of reacting to them, connect engineering activity to outcomes the business can actually use, and build the measurement foundation for wherever software development goes next. But for a company where engineering and product are converging, where agents are beginning to write and review code, and where the pace of change is only accelerating, deployment speed is no longer the right proxy for engineering effectiveness. "Code change will become more commoditized," Ankur says. "At the end of the day, you want to care about how many customers used the thing you just deployed. Were they satisfied? What was the quality? That's what we're trying to measure now." For Remitly, the work with Uplevel is directionally clear: get ahead of problems instead of reacting to them, connect engineering activity to outcomes the business can actually use, and build the measurement foundation for wherever software development goes next. ##### Ready to Uplevel like Remitly? Find out where your organization stands before committing to a transformation roadmap. 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