Developer Experience : What art thou?

You have seen this play out a million times before slow pace of software development cycle, endless meetings to define the perfect set of use-cases, and then the first MVP comes. All this time, your sales team keeps customers enamored with marketecture, slideware, and some slicing and dicing of road maps to present something they think the customer wants to see.

The decision makers that commiserate with you, patiently waiting for your solution to develop and be deployment ready are on verge of extinction. They are being replaced by the ones who are on the hook to keep their businesses running under strained budgets, all the while restless to solve their immediate problems and eager to participate in providing the requirements for the product they will own & deploy.

This is the active and engaged decision maker, influencer and customer that shares their success outcomes with you and expects you to enable theirs- in real time.

The amplifying effect it has on companies making these product offerings is to move at a faster pace more than ever to make it happen, it’s not a far fetched world when your replacement is just a Google search away.

The days of coercive monopolies are well and truly behind us in today’s world of aware customer with monotonically increasing sequence of expectations.

I started thinking about this deeply when I was chartered to roll out the internal Developer experience (DevX) in our organization. So what is the most critical resource in development organizations today? Talent you might say, leadership others might say. Product direction, Strategy, Customer insights...Yes, all of the above have a role, but the most critical resource in today's teams developing software products is the developer's time, it needs to be guarded with the same zeal as you guard your product.

With that thinking, my goal of DevX is all about enabling the developer-- providing tools, methods, and procedures to ease the life of your developers followed by requirements to the developers to have products which are API ready. DevX tools need to go the extra mile to work and remove obstacles so that you get untapped productivity gains that were not possible before.

Similar to how agile software development have to adapted to the needs of organization,so will be the case with Developer Experience.

These tools need to optimize available infrastructure and provide it for frictionless consumption on demand.With the advent of 'Software Clusters for the future', the building of the developer experiences will lead the pace of innovation that your developers can unleash on to your customers.

Over the years, IDE's have played an important role in enhancing developers productivity.The DevX tooling needs to be made part of the same IDE to make sure the gains to be extracted are available to the developers within their preferred environments.

A Customer Centric strategy has to be followed closely by a Developer Centric culture for every product team that wants to be on the path of customer penetration.

In closing, while you can do a lot to improve your product teams processes, improving your customer insights, hire and retain the best talent- the single most important investment you will make will be in your developers time. Enable them to be ultra productive and prioritize their time like you prioritize your executive’s time and the products will come out exceeding all benchmarks- and the customer experience will be excellent.

Being new to this I am eager to learn more from you and your experiences in this area. Am open to buying you a coffee for a healthy conversation around this topic.Feel free to ping me at vibhu.pratap (at) gmail.com

PS: On a side note, this is another picture we had prepared for the blog, would love to get some feedback on which one in your opinion is better.

PPS: Thanks to my friend Jason for helping with the design pic for the blog and Romil Khansaheb for proof reading the blog.