Allstacks’s Context Mission: Why Developer Dissatisfaction (Not Productivity) Drives Their Roadmap
You ship the feature on time. The code is elegant. The tests pass. Then you realize you have no idea why you built it, whether it mattered, or what impact it had. Six months later, you leave because the work feels meaningless.
This isn’t a productivity problem. Productive developers who don’t understand why their work matters are most likely to churn. And companies optimizing for developer velocity while ignoring context are optimizing for the wrong metric.
In a recent episode of Category Visionaries, Hersh Tapadia, CEO and Co-Founder of Allstacks, a value stream intelligence platform that’s raised nearly $16 million, shared how his early career frustration with building in a vacuum became the foundation for Allstacks’s mission—and their primary differentiator in a market obsessed with productivity metrics.
The Dissatisfaction That Almost Ended an Engineering Career
Hersh built Allstacks to solve a problem that almost made him quit engineering entirely.
“The most dissatisfying thing about engineering for me was context. I felt like were always building, were learning, were being taught to operate in a vacuum as engineers, and it almost made me not want to be an engineer anymore.”
This wasn’t about workload or technical challenges. The dissatisfaction came from the complete disconnect between the daily work of writing code and any understanding of why it mattered.
He’d had jobs where he couldn’t find anyone who could explain what the company did or why his task connected to business goals. The lack of context was so profound that he left positions not because the work was hard, but because it felt pointless.
Developers don’t leave because technical problems aren’t challenging. They leave because they’re solving those problems in a vacuum, with no visibility into whether their work matters.
The Two Trains Running on Parallel Tracks
Hersh’s metaphor for the current state captures why this context problem exists.
“If you think about the business and engineering as two trains running on parallel tracks right now in most companies, what happens is those trains are running on these parallel tracks. They look out the window, they can see each other and they’re wondering if they’ll stop at the same station.”
Sometimes the trains do stop at the same station. A feature ships, drives revenue, everyone celebrates. But most of the time, engineering and business are just running parallel, hoping for alignment without any mechanism to ensure it.
This creates dissatisfaction that’s hard to articulate. You can see the business train through the window, but you can’t tell if you’re headed to the same destination.
The result is developers who are technically proficient but existentially unsatisfied. They ship features without understanding business impact. They fix bugs without knowing customer pain. They’re productive in a vacuum.
What Most Engineering Tools Actually Measure
The engineering tools market has optimized for the wrong things. Velocity, story points, lines of code, deployment frequency, cycle time—these metrics all measure output and efficiency.
None of them measure whether developers understand why they’re building what they’re building. None indicate whether engineering work connects to business goals.
This is why companies can have great engineering metrics and terrible retention. You can optimize for velocity while destroying satisfaction. You can hit every sprint commitment while losing your best developers to companies where they understand the “why.”
Hersh recognized this because he’d lived it. The times he was most satisfied weren’t when he was most productive—they were when he understood the full context of what he was building.
The Vision: Any Developer Can Draw the Line
Allstacks’s north star isn’t about making engineering more efficient. It’s about making it more meaningful.
“What we do is provide a platform to help engineering organizations live in context instead of outside of context, so that any developer inside of their organization can draw a line from the work that they’re doing day to the goals of the business.”
Not track more metrics. Not ship faster. Enable every developer to understand how their work connects to what the company is trying to accomplish.
This requires a fundamentally different kind of tool. Instead of measuring what developers do, Allstacks connects what developers do to why it matters.
Why This Became Their Differentiation
Most value stream management platforms position around efficiency: ship faster, eliminate bottlenecks.
Allstacks positions around satisfaction: understand impact, see the connection, work with purpose.
Developer retention is expensive. Replacing a senior engineer can exceed $200,000. If Allstacks helps retain developers by giving them context, the ROI is measured in retention rates, not velocity improvements.
Companies buy productivity tools to go faster. They buy Allstacks to make engineers less likely to leave.
The Product Implications
This mission shapes what Allstacks builds. The product connects engineering work to business outcomes in ways visible to everyone.
This means surfacing not just what teams shipped, but why it mattered. Not just how long features took, but what impact they had.
“What we do is provide a platform to help engineering organizations live in context instead of outside of context, so that any developer inside of their organization can draw a line from the work that they’re doing day to the goals of the business.”
Any developer can see how their specific work connected to company OKRs or customer outcomes. The track is unified.
Making Two Trains Into One
The ultimate vision: “What we want to do is we want to make that one train.”
Not two trains hoping to stop at the same station. One train, where engineering and business are inherently aligned.
This level of context makes work meaningful. Developers who understand business impact make better technical decisions, prioritize more effectively, and advocate for the right trade-offs.
The Broader Lesson
Every company in engineering analytics talks about productivity and velocity. The real opportunity is solving the deeper problem beneath the metrics.
Developer dissatisfaction isn’t about being too busy. It’s about building in a vacuum. Most companies try better communication or more meetings. None create the systematic visibility developers need.
By making developer satisfaction through context the core mission, Allstacks differentiated where everyone else optimizes for speed. Speed without purpose creates dissatisfied, transient teams.
For Hersh, this is personal. He’s building the tool he wishes had existed—the tool that would have prevented the dissatisfaction that almost made him leave engineering entirely.