How Vistra Increased Feature Delivery Speed by 28% With monday dev
Meet Vistra
Vistra is a leading provider of essential business services that help organizations invest and grow efficiently and compliantly worldwide. Operating in over 50 countries with more than 10,000 employees, Vistra supports 30% of Fortune 500 companies through services spanning company incorporation, tax & accounting, payroll & HR.
Behind that global scale sits a lean but powerful engineering team: the Global Expansion Platform (GEP), led by Lead Software Engineer Mervin Tan. Responsible for the technology that underpins Vistra’s secure and efficient operations, the team’s performance is a strategic priority. When delivery processes began to slow, it became clear they needed a better way to work.
What wasn’t working
At Vistra, complexity is a constant. Operating in a highly regulated industry means there’s little room for error. Yet feature requests arrived from every direction — Teams, email, even hallway chats — with no central intake. Engineers often misunderstood priorities, and sprint boards became patchworks of backlog items and mystery tickets. The business side, meanwhile, lacked visibility into progress.
The team relied heavily on Jira and other tools. Jira made sense to developers but was a black box for everyone else. Business teams couldn’t track project status, and engineers needed JQL queries just to find tasks. Documentation was scattered, further fragmenting the process.
It takes years of experience to know how to use Jira,” recalls Mervin. “The engineers were there, and a lot of the documentation lived in the Atlassian ecosystem, but it was hard to bring the non-product teams into the platform.
Delivery slowed, workflows grew inefficient, and engineering became disconnected from the rest of the business. Everyone knew something had to change.
What we built instead
The turning point came when Alan Schmoll, Vistra’s EVP of Platform, recommended expanding monday.com to include engineering. The company was already using monday work management successfully, and Alan saw the value of unifying teams on one platform.
Once the engineering team piloted monday dev, adoption was fast. Engineers appreciated its flexibility and ease of use, while stakeholders valued the transparency.
, adoption was fast. Engineers appreciated its flexibility and ease of use, while stakeholders valued the transparency.The only limit with monday dev is your imagination,” says Mervin. “You start with templates, but then you can build anything you want.
From there, the team rebuilt their delivery process around transparency, automation, and shared ownership.
Centralized roadmaps
The roadmap board is now the starting point for engineering delivery. Product managers create PRDs, which translate into engineering epics containing sub-items for user stories. Ownership columns track both the product lead and assigned engineer, and statuses show whether items are in planning, estimation, or development.
Engineering managers also set a clear rhythm: 75% of time dedicated to roadmap initiatives and 25% to urgent requests or bugs. This ensures focus on strategic work while remaining agile.
Sprint and task execution
Work flows directly from the roadmap into sprint boards. Engineering managers break down user stories into tasks linked to their parent epics. Boards are organized in Kanban and timeline views to visualize active work and manage dependencies.
Custom automations reduce manual overhead — tasks are automatically tagged and updated as they move through statuses, and team members get timely notifications. What once required constant manual tracking now happens seamlessly in the background.
AI-powered bug and feature management
Vistra also rebuilt its bug and feature request process. Instead of ad-hoc messages, they introduced a structured bug intake system powered by monday WorkForms. Anyone in the company can now submit issues in a consistent format that feeds directly into an intake board.
monday dev automations track both response and resolution times, providing visibility into SLAs and performance. The team also leverages AI auto-categorization and triage, accelerating prioritization and response.
GitHub integration and performance dashboards
To keep engineers in flow, monday dev is integrated directly with GitHub. Commits, branches, and pull requests automatically sync to monday items, linking code to roadmap and sprint work. Engineers stay in GitHub; product managers and stakeholders track progress in monday dev.
Dashboards such as the Engineering Performance Dashboard display real-time metrics like sprint velocity, burn-down, and roadmap vs. non-roadmap work. These insights help ensure the team maintains its 75/25 focus and adapts quickly as priorities shift.
AI sprint summary
Vistra also uses monday dev’s AI Sprint Summary, which helps managers track progress at the end of each cycle. Mervin sees even more potential ahead:
He notes, “These tools will be even more powerful once teams can add their own custom prompts.”
Connecting engineering with the rest of the business
One of the most transformative outcomes has been alignment. Previously, product and commercial teams worked separately from engineering, relying on manual updates and email threads. Now, with monday dev and monday work management operating on the same platform, those silos are gone. Everyone shares a single source of truth.
With monday dev, everyone can see what’s happening – the commercial team, product, and engineering,” says Mervin. “It’s all transparent now.
The impact
The results have been immediate and measurable. Vistra reported a 28% improvement in time to market after rebuilding its workflows and delivery process. Engineers spend less time switching tools, product managers track progress in real time, and stakeholders finally have full visibility.
Everything is connected now — the roadmap, user stories, bugs, and tasks,” says Mervin. “That connectivity keeps us fast and aligned.
Where requests once got lost in Teams messages, they now flow through a transparent, trackable system. Where stakeholders once chased updates, dashboards provide answers instantly. And where engineering once operated in isolation, it is now closely integrated with the business.
Lessons from the dev team
For teams considering monday dev, Mervin’s advice is simple: start with templates and iterate.
Start with the pre-built templates that provide a foundation you can launch with immediately. Once you’re up and running, feel free to customize. The platform adapts to the way your team works, not the other way around. The more you experiment, the more value you’ll unlock.
What’s next
Vistra is already exploring new ways to push efficiency further — expanding its use of AI features to reduce manual reporting, testing VS Code integrations for in-IDE task management, and experimenting with hybrid portfolio views that connect engineering initiatives to enterprise strategy.
Final thoughts
For Vistra, monday dev has been a reset — directly tying engineering to business outcomes. The company has moved from fragmented requests and opaque delivery to a transparent, connected system. Delivery is faster, collaboration smoother, and alignment stronger.
“As a team, our strength was always our cohesive teamwork,” Mervin concludes. “monday dev has amplified that by creating a seamless, transparent environment for collaboration. It’s empowered us to tackle any project, no matter how complex.”
