How Plaid Built a Production SLA Dashboard in 3 Days with Replit Agent

Quick Overview

Plaid successfully built a production-ready Service Level Agreement (SLA) dashboard in just three days during a 2-hour hackathon by leveraging Replit Agent to automate manual processes like uptime metric reviews, report generation, and data reconciliation, ultimately saving the team 96 hours annually and enabling a fully self-service model.

Key Points: A Plaid team built a production SLA dashboard in three days, stemming from a two-hour hackathon project. The automation project saved an estimated 96 hours per year (37 hours for SLA management + 20+ hours reconciling data/reports). The manual process involved reviewing uptime metrics via dashboard, generating reports, processing, and managing SLA processes, which was deemed quite manual. The solution, built using Replit, focused on automating uptime review, report generation, and data reconciliation, reducing manual time from 20 hours to 20 minutes. The resulting dashboard provides transparency, reduces friction, and enables a fully self-service model for internal teams (Customer Engineering, Support, Implementation, TAMs) and customers. The team decided against hiring consultants or buying generic software, choosing instead to have their internal team build the exact solution needed during the hackathon.

Context: Natalie Mercuri, Organizational Development Manager for the Customer Engineering and Support team at Plaid, discusses how her team sought to eliminate time-consuming, manual processes related to tracking Service Level Agreements (SLAs) and uptime metrics. The team identified that tasks like reconciling data and generating reports consumed significant time, prompting them to use a company hackathon to develop an automated solution using Replit Agent.

Detailed Analysis

The presentation details how a team at Plaid, motivated by the tedious nature of managing Service Level Agreements (SLAs) and uptime metrics, used a two-hour hackathon to create an automated solution using Replit Agent. The existing manual process required over 20 hours monthly for reviewing uptime metrics, generating reports, processing data, and managing SLAs across teams like Customer Engineering, Support, Implementation, and Technical Account Management (TAMs). Initial estimates suggested this manual work consumed 37 hours/year on SLA management alone, plus over 20 hours/year reconciling data and reports, totaling a significant time sink. The team explicitly decided not to outsource this to consultants or use generic software, opting instead for an internal build. Using Replit, they developed a support dashboard that automated the review of uptime metrics, report generation, and data reconciliation. This automation slashed the time spent on these tasks from over 20 hours to just 20 minutes monthly, resulting in a saving of 96 hours annually. The new system drives transparency, reduces friction, and moves them toward a fully self-service model that customers are requesting, without requiring external intervention or waiting for IT.