Engineering Enablement by Abi Noda

10 years of driving developer productivity at Yelp | Kent Wills (Yelp)

Mar 26, 2024

Kent Wills, Director of Engineering at Yelp, discusses the evolution of developer productivity efforts. Topics include forming the team, managing code ownership in a monolith, building a design system, standardization, LLM implementation, and demonstrating the value of their work.

45:14

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Episode guests

Kent Wills

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Quick takeaways

Yelp focused on standardization while allowing innovation, transitioning from a monolithic structure to separate services.

Building a metrics platform and utilizing LLM tools enhanced support functions and streamlined service migrations at Yelp.

Deep dives

Origin of Developer Productivity Group at Yelp

The developer productivity group at Yelp started due to inspiration from Twitter's scaling methods where they aimed for standardization while allowing innovation. Initially focused on getting out of the monolith, they gradually built towards creating a design system team to manage common styles and components efficiently.

Empowering Users through Internal Linking System

01:27

Bottom-Up Approach to Problem-Solving

01:01

Introduction

3min

Evolution of Developer Productivity and Catalyst for Team Formation

2min

Navigating Leadership Buy-In for Organizational Problem Solving

2min

Transitioning from Monolithic Codebase to Separate Services

12min

Navigating Standardization and Developer Autonomy

19min

Exploring the Implementation of LLMs at Yelp for Developer Support and Migrations

6min

Click here to listen to the episode transcript.

On this week's episode, Abi interviews Kent Wills, Director of Engineering Effectiveness at Yelp. He shares insights into the evolution of their developer productivity efforts over the past decade. From tackling challenges with their monolithic architecture to scaling productivity initiatives for over 1,300 developers. Kent also touches on his experience in building a business case for developer productivity.

Discussion points:

(1:42) Forming the developer productivity team
(3:25) Naming the team engineering effectiveness
(4:30) Getting leadership buy-in for focusing on this work
(7:54) Managing code ownership in Yelp’s monolith
(12:23) Supporting the design system
(16:00) The business case for forming a dedicated team
(19:45) How to standardize
(23:50) How their approach to standardization might be different in another company
(27:08) Demonstrating the value of their work
(32:21) Building an insights platform
(38:47) How Yelp is using LLM’s

Mentions and Links

Connect with Kent Wills on LinkedIn
Watch Kent’s 2023 talk at Elevate
Listen to the interview with Peter Seibel (“Let 1,000 flowers bloom”)
Download the recently published benchmarks on developer productivity team headcount

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Engineering Enablement by Abi Noda

10 years of driving developer productivity at Yelp | Kent Wills (Yelp)

Episode guests

Podcast summary created with Snipd AI

Quick takeaways

Deep dives

Origin of Developer Productivity Group at Yelp

Balancing Standardization and Autonomy

Evolution Towards Separate Services and Design System

Metrics Platform and LLM Implementation

Empowering Users through Internal Linking System

Bottom-Up Approach to Problem-Solving

Remember Everything You Learn from Podcasts