DX

Another highlight from my chat with CTO of?DX,?Laura Tacho, on technical debt and its acute parallels to financial debt, interest, and the value of “paying” it off regularly. We dig into developer experience, AI coding tools, and more in our 17 minute talk. Full interview link in comments.

You have engineering metrics — now what? ?? I have written about metrics for years, and I have found that the biggest pain for engineering teams is not figuring out what to measure (by now, there are plenty of good frameworks out there), but what to do with the data. As a result, metrics often end up unused in dashboards or reports. To discuss this, this week we brought in the awesome Laura Tacho, CTO at DX, to write a full article on Refactoring. Laura explained her process, which is very practical: ? ?? ???????? ???????? ?????????????? — before implementing metrics, clarify if you're using them for diagnostics (trends) or improvement (specific behaviors), and whether they're for the broad engineering org or for platform teams. ? ?? ???????????????????? ???? ?????????????????????? — use diagnostic metrics (like DORA) to identify trends monthly/quarterly, and improvement metrics to drive daily/weekly behaviors with specific, actionable insights. Both are useful, but in different ways. ? ??? ???????????? ?????????????? — transform high-level diagnostic metrics into actionable improvement ones by analyzing boundaries, processes, and developer feedback to identify the specific areas which are within teams' control. ? ?? ?????????????????????? ???? ?????????????? — leadership must *pressurize the system* by incorporating metrics into workflows, planning meetings, and retrospectives to create accountability. ? ?? ???????????? ???? ?????? ???????? — tell stories with your data, use industry benchmarks for context, and combine quantitative and qualitative feedback to drive improvement rather than just collecting numbers. I loved this process and I found the difference between diagnostics and improvement metrics to be particularly useful. It echoes the difference between leading and lagging indicators in product. I attach the full (free!) article in the comments! ??

We believe tracking developer experience isn’t optional—it’s essential. DX CEO Abi Noda shares key insights on effective developer surveys in our R&D Reporting Guide. Download it here: https://bit.ly/4bt7u82

Announcing our latest partnership with Coder, a cloud-based development platform that eliminates the configuration headaches of traditional local development, enabling engineers to start coding instantly on secure, pre-configured environments—wherever they are. At DX, we're often asked by customers about the tools we recommend for improving productivity. To provide objective recommendations, we partner with forward-thinking vendors to study and measure the effectiveness of their products. Coder helps companies like Dropbox, Skydio, and highly regulated financial institutions speed up developer onboarding by reducing the time developers spend setting up, updating, or dealing with issues in their development environment. Through our partnership, we'll evaluate Coder's impact on developer productivity and share findings along the way. Read more about this new partnership: https://lnkd.in/gepvVhvJ

Ten months on from our first DX snapshot we've concluded our fourth today. At the outset I was nervous about whether the claims around consistent high response rates would be true. There's always doubt about whether it would translate in your own company context. So, I thought it would be worth sharing that our experience upholds the claims. Across a population of around 2,000 developers we've now run four snapshots with each achieving 90%+ participation. But participation isn't the key metric. The outcomes around developer experience and effectiveness that the insight drives are what matters. Our experience is that using this mechanism we've really seen success in teams taking their own initiative to improve their own lot. I've had countless conversations with developers, engineering leaders and product managers around how this insight and openness has enabled better conversations around the need to invest more in technical debt, flow state and other factors impacting developer effectiveness. We've been able to share some internal success stories where teams have made tangible improvements. Then allied to those 'bottom up' outcomes are how this insight enables teams like my own to derive clear product priority signal; find cohorts for user research; define great OKRs and measure the impact of wider initiatives we can support engineers with. The reality here is that these wider initiatives lag and take longer to show up but we are starting to see positive impact. The trick in my experience is to balance how we can help teams with what they are doing today whilst also plotting the course and creating what tomorrow should look like. It's also key that teams feel heard and that centrally driven initiatives feel like they are being done with them not to them. So that bottom up and central out combination is what matters and the sustained participation rate is a side-effect of that being real. Whilst it is true that the way DX have implemented snapshot surveys and the smart nudging via Slack/Teams helps, I think it fundamentally holds true that people will stop participating if they don't feel heard and see positive outcomes from it. That's why I still pay attention to our participation rate and never take it for granted. Aside: the chart shows snapshot participation rates day by day. We launch on a Monday and respondents get a Teams DM. For the subsequent four days people yet to respond get a gentle automated nudge DM. On the following Monday I send a personalised nudge DM that comes directly from my Teams account and this works really well to get a final kick. I also make sure in that nudge to recognise that it captures people who were not at work the previous week and welcome them back :) It's also worth pointing out that people can still respond for some time after we 'close' the snapshot and results are available. We typically see another 1% increase after close. We don't send any emails around calls for participation.

At ICONIQ Growth, we strive to bring clarity to complex topics with data-driven insights—one of the most debated being developer productivity. In a space with no clear consensus, DX has introduced a thoughtful framework to evaluate developer productivity while also enabling companies to seamlessly track these metrics. Alongside our partnership, we’re releasing an updated R&D Reporting Guide featuring DX’s Core 4 framework—?which we believe is?a game-changer for engineering teams. Download the report here: https://bit.ly/4bt7u82

At Block, engineering velocity has always been our competitive advantage. But as we've grown to 4,000+ engineers supporting millions of customers across Square, Cash App, Spiral, and TIDAL, we've had to rethink how we maintain startup-level speed at enterprise scale. Our Head of Developer Experience, Azra Coburn shares how we're investing in developer experience to reclaim over 500,000 hours of engineer time annually through instant developer environments where "everything just works" and AI-powered workflows that can turn months-long migrations into days. Check out the full article on CIO Online to see how our DevEx team is making it easier for our developers to innovate rapidly: https://lnkd.in/gh98ACDH

Finalising the DX snapshot feels like waiting to unwrap a gift—full of anticipation for actionable insights, especially with such a strong response rate!

How Twilio measures developer experience with DX:

Last Thursday Thomas Krag and I had the pleasure to share our ongoing journey of building a developer-first observability platform around Datadog. During the talk we showed key concepts that are essential within the infrastructure vision I’ve introduced to DHL eCommerce Nederland. A ?????????? ?????????????? of what we went through: ???What led us to switch from an open source observability stack to DataDog ???What Team Topologies is and how it's concepts help improve ??????????-???????? ?????????????????????????? and drive a ???????????????? ?????????????? ???Why we chose to pivot towards ???????????????? ?????????????????????? to accelerate our observability platform adoption ????How we use IaC principles to drive ???????????????? by teams through self-service while safeguarding governance, compliance and finances ???????Techniques we use to understand our user and their needs ???How developer feedback through DX plays a pivotal role in measuring succes and driving improvements The engagement with the audience was amazing, with lots of great questions about striking the right balance between click-ops and mandating IaC to ensuring that your teams don’t accidentally spent all your money on DataDog ?? If you’re curious about what worked or what didn’t work for us on our journey, or if you’re curious about specific elements mentioned above, feel free to get in touch! Last but lot least, thanks again to Tim Meijer for having us over at the Datadog ???????? ???????????? #platformengineering #teamtopologies #datadog #observability #dx #iac #productthinking #devex