When should you establish a Developer Productivity team?

This is the latest issue of my newsletter. Each week I share research and perspectives on developer productivity. Subscribe to get future issues.

Deciding when to establish a dedicated Developer Productivity team can be a difficult question. If you do so too early, you risk wasting resources that could be better allocated elsewhere. If you wait too long, you could end up with numerous issues that slow down your developers that are difficult to resolve easily.

This is a question that comes up often when we talk to leaders, so we wanted to conduct research to help support leaders facing these decisions. We interviewed 20 companies to learn about when they established their Developer Productivity team, what influenced the timing, and whether their timing was optimal. Here's what we discovered:?

Some of the companies that we interviewed established DevProd teams as early as 50 engineers, while others waited until they were several thousand engineers. There weren't clear factors that determined timing, although non-tech companies such as Mercedes, Thomson Reuters, and Disney tended to have waited longer.

We asked leaders whether they felt their DevProd teams were established on time or too late. Interestingly, companies like Lattice and Cash App, which established DevProd teams at around 100 engineers, felt their timing was late, while Thomson Reuters and Disney felt their investment was on time. We wondered, how could both of these things be true??

We learned that Disney and Thomson Reuters had invested in platform work long before establishing a dedicated Developer Productivity group. Lattice and Cash App, on the other hand, shared that there wasn’t a well-coordinated effort to improve developer experience until their dedicated team had been established.

In other words, the difference in timing boiled down to how effectively the organization could tackle developer productivity challenges without a dedicated function. Additionally, the concept of having a dedicated DevProd team is a relatively new industry trend – this further explains why some of the older companies were so large when they first established their functions.

Download the full report to read perspectives from leaders who felt their DevProd teams were established on time or too late.

When to establish a dedicated DevProd team

So, when is the right time to establish a dedicated DevProd team??

Two-thirds of the organizations that we interviewed reported that their timing felt optimal, while the other third felt that their timing was too late. Notably, none of the organizations we interviewed felt that their timing was too early.

We coded our interview responses to distill the key factors that contributed to organizations feeling that their timing was optimal or too late. The table below summarizes the results.

Several themes stood out as key drivers for establishing a dedicated DevProd team:

During major shifts. A natural time to introduce a Developer Productivity team is during a major technology transition. For instance, Stem hired their first member while shifting from monolithic architecture to microservices and adopting Kubernetes, which required a focus on engineering enablement. Thoughtspot began when they changed their strategy to scale from private cloud to hybrid cloud. Similarly, Thomson Reuters began platform engineering when they transitioned to the public cloud.

There's a need for standardization or cost efficiency. It’s difficult to standardize infrastructure or establish golden paths without a centralized function that’s responsible for these initiatives. For example, Tapad (now part of Experian) wanted to reduce redundancies in tooling and ensure mature development practices across their organization. Thoughtspot’s DevEx team evaluated the existing usage of tools and was able to drive more cost-effective operations so they could increase customers while operating on the same costs. Establishing a dedicated team in charge of these efforts allowed the organization to make rapid progress.?

Infrastructure can’t keep up with business growth. Several of the organizations we studied faced challenges as their infrastructure struggled to support the company’s scale. For example, Mercury initially maintained their infrastructure through volunteer efforts. But once the company grew to 50 engineers, it made sense to have a full-time function focused on these problems.?

Invest in developer experience before establishing a team

At many of the organizations we studied, developer experience investments began before a dedicated team was established. At DX, we’ve seen many organizations successfully tackle developer productivity with local efforts before establishing a centralized function. Even once a centralized function is established, local efforts are critical.

Here are some best practices that we’ve seen:?

Allocate a fixed percentage of engineering investment toward developer productivity improvements. This aligns the organizations from the top-down, ensuring that DevProd investments aren’t drowned out by feature work. For example, Atlassian’s leadership team told developers to use 10% of their time improving the things that ‘make their day job suck.’?

Provide teams with data about their developer experience. This is particularly useful for Platform teams that can't dictate how teams spend their time. By delivering insights at the team level, for example about their pain points or metrics like deployment frequency, we’ve seen teams feel motivated and organically start tackling these problems. This practice of having team-level data can also help advocate for DevEx investments, as it shows the impact that these problems are having and the opportunity for the business to solve them.?

Assign dedicated internal champions for specific developer experience areas. These champions can curate insights and best practices, thereby providing visibility to leaders and support for teams that are confronting common challenges.

We hope that this article provides benchmarks and strategies that you can use to determine when to establish a dedicated Developer Productivity team. In an upcoming article, we’ll explore what types of investments these teams should be initially focused on.?

Download the full report here.

Who’s hiring right now

Here is a roundup of DevEx job openings. Find more open roles here.

• Netflix is hiring a Product Manager - Developer Platform | US
• Snyk is hiring a VP, Engineering - Developer Experience | Boston, London
• Webflow is hiring an Engineering Manager - Developer Productivity | US
• VTEX is hiring a Engineering Manager - Developer Experience | Brazil

That’s it for this week. Thanks for reading.

-Abi