9 min read
A Landscape of Confusion
By 2025, the tech industry will be more data-driven than ever, with engineering teams and leaders relying on metrics-driven insights to improve software delivery performance. However, the rise of Software Engineering Intelligence (SEI) platforms, existing Value Stream Management (VSM) platforms, and engineering metrics solutions have created a new challenge: marketing confusion.
Platform vendors, eager to differentiate their offerings, often blur the lines between these categories, making it increasingly difficult for technology leaders to distinguish between tools designed for engineering visibility versus those aimed at full-value stream optimization. This confusion leads to misaligned expectations, ineffective investments, and ultimately, frustration when organizations realize they’ve purchased a solution that doesn’t align with their needs.
This article serves as a follow-up to my August 2024 article:
Since that article, the landscape has continued to evolve. SEI platforms have gained significant momentum, the DX Core 4 framework has been introduced, and VSM platforms are still in the conversation—but with a shifting narrative.
Derek Holt, CEO of Digital.ai, has observed what he believes to be a major industry shift:
“While Value Stream Management continued to lose steam in 2024, we also saw the fast emergence of Software Engineering Intelligence (SEI) to take its place.”
— Derek Holt, CEO of Digital.ai (SD Times)
However, other experts argue that VSM remains critical for aligning technology with business outcomes. Heather Spring, a senior Product Marketing expert, highlights the enduring value of VSM:
“VSM is more than a process improvement tool—it’s a framework for achieving measurable business outcomes.”
— Heather Spring, Broadcom ValueOps (Broadcom Academy)
These contrasting viewpoints contribute to a growing problem:
- Senior leaders struggle to distinguish between practices and platforms.
- Different tools claim to offer “the future of software measurement,” but many serve only a narrow scope.
- Organizations risk making misinformed investments based on incomplete narratives.
My Perspective as of February 2025
This article represents my point of view, given the current state of these technologies in early 2025. Over the past few years, I’ve observed significant shifts in how software measurement platforms are marketed, adopted, and integrated into organizations.
Importantly, this article does not dive into specific frameworks such as DORA, SPACE, Flow Metrics, or team sentiment and developer experience qualitative metrics. Instead, it focuses on the platforms that integrate these various metrics and how their marketing narratives have confused senior leaders unfamiliar with this space.
The Growing Demand for Data-Driven Insights
A few years back, DORA metrics gained much attention, and early tools focused on providing dashboards to track them. Over time, these tools evolved and rebranded as Software Engineering Intelligence (SEI) solutions.
SEI platforms have gained significant traction recently as organizations recognize the importance of developer efficiency, software delivery performance, and engineering operational health. These platforms provide granular insights into pull request cycle times, deployment frequencies, mean time to recovery (MTTR), and engineering throughput, giving leaders a clear picture of how efficiently software is being built and delivered.
At their core, SEI platforms are designed to improve engineering operations, helping teams identify delivery bottlenecks, optimize workflow efficiency, and measure team health. For organizations still struggling to improve operational efficiency within delivery, SEI platforms make perfect sense—they provide immediate feedback on a team’s ability to ship high-quality software consistently.
However, SEI is not the same as Value Stream Management.
Understanding the Misconceptions Around SEI and VSM
The key difference between these platforms lies in their scope. While SEI focuses on engineering processes, VSM platforms aim to provide end-to-end visibility across the entire software development lifecycle—from ideation and discovery to delivery and operation. The challenge is that many platform vendors position SEI as interchangeable with VSM, when in reality, the two serve different yet complementary purposes.
This overlap often leads to misaligned expectations for companies adopting these tools. Organizations seeking deep engineering intelligence might mistakenly invest in a VSM platform. VSM platforms can be more expensive because they can gather and present data from all stages of the digital product lifecycle, and most vendors target the larger enterprise market. However, they may lack detailed data from the engineering delivery stage, or your organization may not be ready to handle this scope. Companies looking for full end-to-end visibility might purchase an SEI platform focusing only on software delivery, preventing them from improving efficiency in the other value stream stages.
I recommend using metrics that cover the entire Value Stream, but this might not be cost-effective for many companies. To avoid choosing the wrong platform, technology leaders should start by identifying their organization’s bottlenecks:
- An SEI platform is likely the best investment if engineering teams struggle with delivery performance.
- If the challenge extends beyond engineering—into product management, discovery, and business alignment—VSM becomes a stronger choice.
VSM Only Works If Other Departments Are Engaged
One of the companies’ biggest mistakes when adopting VSM platforms is assuming that technology alone can drive the initiative. The reality is that unless other departments—such as marketing, sales, or business leadership—see the value in tracking their processes, a VSM approach will not deliver full business impact.
VSM investment becomes effective when organizations use it to:
- Track and improve discovery workflows, such as how product teams validate ideas before passing them to engineering.
- Interest in capturing how the marketing and sales teams collaborate to support the discovery phase of the value stream by capturing these processes.
- Provide visibility into how cross-functional collaboration impacts the creation and delivery of digital products.
If your leadership and other departments discuss process visibility and workflow optimization, a VSM solution can drive enterprise-wide improvements in parallel with software delivery improvements. However, if the initiative is primarily driven by engineering, then SEI is the better starting point, allowing teams to optimize delivery before expanding to broader value stream visibility.
My Journey Evaluating These Platforms in 2022
Between 2022 and 2023, before the term Software Engineering Intelligence (SEI) became widely known, I carried out a detailed evaluation of platforms for my organization including:
- Digital.ai
- ServiceNow
- Planview (then Tasktop Viz)
- Jellyfish
- Broadcom
- LinearB
- Plutora
- Pluralsight Flow
- Sleuth
Most of these platforms have improved since I first evaluated them. At the time, to the best of my knowledge, tools like LinearB, Sleuth, and Jellyfish had not yet embraced the term SEI. They were engineering analytics tools focused on measuring software delivery performance. Meanwhile, Tasktop, Digital.ai, Broadcom, and ServiceNow identified their offerings as Value Stream Management (VSM) platforms.
Given our organization’s transformation stage, I narrowed the choices down to two platforms:
- Tasktop Viz (now Planview Viz) – A strong VSM platform offering broad value stream insights but lacking delivery-stage granularity.
- LinearB – A strong delivery-focused platform providing deep engineering analytics but lacked visibility for ideation-to-delivery.
At the time, I saw clear trade-offs:
- VSM platforms were valuable for tracking end-to-end flow but lacked deep delivery insights.
- Delivery-focused platforms had engineering visibility but provided no insight into ideation or operations and support stages of the Value Stream.
In 2024, my preferred VSM platform acquired an SEI platform, confirming my earlier belief that larger VSM platforms without detailed delivery integration would eventually seek to expand their capabilities through acquisitions.
The Emergence of DX Core 4
Contributing to the ever-changing landscape and array of choices, a major development is DX Core 4—a framework designed to unify existing developer productivity models. DX Core 4 brings together principles from DORA, SPACE, and DevEx, focusing on four key dimensions:
- Speed – How quickly software moves through the system.
- Effectiveness – The ability to deliver software that meets requirements.
- Quality – Ensuring software meets standards while minimizing defects.
- Impact – Measuring the business and customer impact of software delivery.
The intent behind DX Core 4 is to balance these metrics, preventing over-optimization in one area at the cost of another. GetDX’s announcement provides more details.
Breaking Down Marketing Myths
Myth 1: AI is Exclusive to SEI
The SEI Claim: SEI platforms are the future because they use AI for deep analytics and decision support, while VSM platforms do not.
The Reality: This is completely false. Leading VSM platforms, including Planview Viz and ServiceNow, have invested heavily in AI and generative AI-driven insights for deep data analysis, decision-making, and flow optimization.
SEI vs. VSM AI Capabilities
AI is not an SEI-exclusive feature. Instead, both SEI and VSM integrate AI-driven analytics—SEI for engineering delivery metrics, and VSM for end-to-end business value flow across the organization.
Additionally, Planview’s Viz (copilot), Broadcom’s ValueOps (The Future of Value Stream Management Will Be Powered by AI), and others have integrated AI-driven workflow automation, tool integration, and predictive analytics, further demonstrating that AI capabilities are not exclusive to SEI.
Myth 2: SEI Covers the Full Value Stream
The SEI Claim: SEI platforms provide comprehensive visibility into software engineering performance.
The Reality: SEI platforms focus on the delivery stage of digital product development. They analyze developer productivity, team and operational efficiency, and software engineering health—but they do not track the full lifecycle of a digital product from ideation to operation. The SEI platform might be exactly what your organization needs at its current stage or context.
Comparing Scope: SEI vs. VSM
The Main Takeaway
The key takeaway in the SEI vs. VSM discussion isn’t which toolset is gaining momentum—it’s about scope. Don’t let marketing hype or opinions mislead you. While they can guide your decision, it’s crucial to understand the framework or label: SEI focuses on software delivery performance metrics within the build and deployment pipeline, while VSM spans the entire digital product lifecycle—discovery, delivery, operations, and support.
SEI tools offer limited insights into how efficiently code moves through development and deployment, but VSM goes further by asking: Are we delivering the right value efficiently across the entire product journey? When evaluating a VSM platform, consider both the quality of development and deployment metrics and the broader data they use to provide visibility across the value stream and organizational impact.
Rather than viewing SEI as a competitor to VSM, see it as a specialized tool for the delivery stage, while VSM ensures visibility, optimization, and continuous improvement across the entire value stream.
Choose the Right Metrics for Your Needs
Instead of asking, “Which platform is winning?” the better question is:
Which platform works best for your needs and provides the best visibility—whether for a specific part of your value stream or the entire one?
Organization and Engineering leaders should focus on what matters: selecting the right tools to address the correct problems. The question isn’t just about SEI vs. VSM—it’s about clearly understanding:
- Where your organization’s bottlenecks exist
- Who is driving the initiative
- What level of visibility will drive the most impact
A few years ago, I started working with modern metrics like DORA. Since then, I’ve become a board member of the Value Stream Management Consortium, a champion for VSM implementation at my current organization, and an advocate for aligning software delivery metrics with business outcomes. This has given me the chance to explore the growing world of value stream management (VSM) and software engineering intelligence (SEI) platforms. Interestingly, a former colleague of mine is now a co-founder of one of these emerging platforms.
Vendors often use persuasive marketing to grab your attention and budget, but it’s important not to get caught up in the hype. Focus on your organization’s specific needs and the scope of the solutions offered. VSM and SEI platforms can differ greatly in features and cost, so finding the right fit means balancing your budget with your business priorities. Take the time to assess what truly matches your goals before making a decision.
Poking Holes
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