Sally Kohn: I was laughing in my head a little bit. Just had a conversation for this podcast that'll go out in a week or so with some folks at Google who talked about how they were tracking all these different objective metrics, but literally these metrics don't mean anything. If you can't say whether they're actually good or not good and they talked about how the only way to actually know if they're good or bad is to go talk to people and get more that qualitative side, the human side of the experience. So I think yeah, kind of going back to my previous company, certainly one of the things that we dealt with as we were going through really heavy growth
This week we’re joined by Jason Kennedy, Senior Engineering Manager of Developer Experience at One Medical. Jason’s team takes a uniquely customer-driven approach to improving the developer experience, and in this episode he describes their philosophy and how it works in practice. Jason explains how they shadow developers, how they run surveys, and more.
Discussion points:
- (1:02) Renaming from Engineering Efficiency to Engineering Experience
- (4:17) How Platform and DevEx teams differ
- (5:38) How One Medical’s approach to customer experience inspires this team’s work
- (7:01) Mapping out the developer journey
- (11:14) Jason’s career transition from VPE to a line manager role
- (14:14) Challenges some companies face with getting buy-in for a DevEx team
- (16:22) Taking a customer service approach to DevEx
- (19:12) Jason’s experience with DORA metrics
- (22:19) Lessons learned about ownership
- (24:18) The “Gemba” practice used at One Medical
- (28:02) How information from the Gemba practice is stored
- (30:59) Using weekly polls to surface pain points
- (34:03) Tracking trends in the poll
- (35:00) Using a quarterly NPS survey for overall sentiment
- (37:08) How sentiment is measured and evaluated
- (41:44) The biggest challenges with surveys
Mentions and links:
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