Driving Software Maturity and Standards at ecobee with OpsLevel

The Challenge

ecobee, a leader in smart home technology known for its innovative thermostats and home monitoring systems, needed a robust way to drive software maturity across a fast-growing engineering organization of 150+ developers. While they had adopted an open-source internal developer portal—for service cataloging and visibility, the tool fell short when it came to improving and maintaining software quality.

The open-source offering helped surface service metadata, but it lacked native support for enforcing engineering standards or measuring maturity in a scalable, automated way.

Key gaps included:

• No built-in health scoring: ecobee couldn’t easily measure whether services met operational or security standards.
• Manual enforcement: Without automation, the team relied on spreadsheets, Slack reminders, and tribal knowledge to enforce standards which slowed progress and created inconsistencies.
• No structured initiative management: When ecobee needed to run org-wide efforts like language upgrades or dependency migrations, they lacked a centralized system to orchestrate the work. These projects often ballooned into weeks of status chasing and manual coordination.

Platform and DevOps leaders needed a way to scale maturity without adding more overhead.

The Solution

ecobee adopted OpsLevel to fill the gaps and bring order and automation to its maturity journey. Two features in particular made the difference:

Scorecards

OpsLevel’s Scorecards automated maturity tracking for every service in ecobee’s environment. These real-time health checks allowed teams to continuously monitor compliance with standards—such as proper runbook links, ownership metadata, and security configurations—without manual intervention.

The result: proactive identification of risk, and a clearer roadmap for improving software quality across the board.

Campaigns

Campaigns gave platform leaders a way to run cross-team initiatives at scale like language upgrades or deprecating tech stacks. Instead of sending emails and chasing updates, they could:

• Define objectives and requirements
• Target specific services or teams
• Automate tracking and reminders
• Measure progress in real time

This structure helped ecobee eliminate the chaos of spreadsheet-based project management and empowered teams to complete initiatives faster and more consistently.

We needed something more mature for standards enforcement. With OpsLevel, we didn't have to run our own developer portal, and the Scorecards and standards features were well-developed. So we made the switch. —Jason Hadi

Implementation and Adoption

The transition to OpsLevel was smooth and completed in roughly 60 days. ecobee appreciated OpsLevel’s managed, hosted approach—eliminating the maintenance burden of self-hosting and allowing the platform team to focus on driving value rather than managing infrastructure.

Campaigns quickly became an internal standard for rolling out engineering-wide projects, and Scorecards helped communicate expectations across teams more clearly and consistently than ever before.

Results and Impact

Since implementing OpsLevel, ecobee has:

• Upleveled over 600 services with improved maturity and standards compliance
  

• Standardized engineering practices across teams without relying on tribal knowledge
  

• Increased visibility and alignment between platform teams and service owners

OpsLevel not only helped ecobee scale their maturity efforts—it gave them a shared language for what “good” looks like.

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