Platform team challenges, realigning on DevEx, and change management
Oct 25, 2024
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Emanuel Mueller Ramos, Head of Developer Experience at Skyscanner, shares his insights on transforming his team into a customer-centric powerhouse. He discusses gaining stakeholder buy-in, redefining productivity metrics, and prioritizing developer happiness. Emanuel highlights the importance of feedback loops in shifting from frameworks to a culture of collaboration. He also dives into the intricate balance between platform teams and developer experience, stressing that true success lies in measuring impact rather than just tool adoption.
The creation of the DX Core 4 framework enables organizations to measure and enhance developer productivity by focusing on qualitative impacts.
Transitioning to a customer-centric culture at Skyscanner involved understanding engineers' needs and fostering collaboration between teams for better outcomes.
Deep dives
Introduction of the DX Core 4 Framework
A new framework called the DX Core 4 has been developed to measure productivity by integrating insights from DORA, SPACE, and DevX. This framework emerges from ongoing research and practical experiences with successful companies like Dropbox, Etsy, and Pfizer. The DX Core 4 aims to provide a structured approach to enhance developer productivity and experience. By using this framework, organizations can gain a clearer understanding of how to measure and improve productivity within their engineering teams.
Transition to a Developer Experience Division
The creation of a dedicated division focused on developer productivity and happiness at Skyscanner marked a significant organizational shift. Led by a new leader who inherited a capable group of four teams, this transition aimed to address challenges related to the diverse technological stack and the lack of focus in ongoing projects. The leader identified a need to prioritize certain areas and engage stakeholders to establish clarity and direction. This approach involved a detailed domain mapping exercise to identify where the teams could have the greatest impact and how to enhance collaboration with product engineering customers.
Measuring Success Beyond Tool Adoption
The discussion around success metrics evolved from a primary focus on tool adoption to a broader perspective on overall developer productivity. Initially, adoption rates were seen as indicators of value; however, the need arose to identify metrics that truly represent the qualitative impact of tools and frameworks on productivity. The team began exploring other pillars of developer experience, such as cognitive load, flow state, and feedback loops, to discover more effective ways to measure success. This shift in focus highlighted the importance of addressing the real needs of developers and enhancing their overall experience rather than just increasing usage of tools.
Cultural Shift Toward Customer Focus
Emphasizing a customer-focused approach within the organization was crucial for shifting team culture. The new leader instilled the importance of understanding engineers' needs by encouraging direct interactions and soliciting feedback. By identifying volunteers genuinely interested in fostering relationships with product engineering teams, the organization aimed to create a more collaborative environment. This cultural change ensures that the developer experience initiative is rooted in genuinely addressing the engineers' challenges, which ultimately leads to better outcomes for the organization.
In this episode, Emanuel Mueller Ramos, Head of Developer Experience at Skyscanner, discusses the evolution of his team as they transitioned from focusing on frameworks and middleware to becoming a customer-centric, impact-driven organization. Emanuel details the strategies he used to gain stakeholder buy-in, why it's crucial to rethink traditional productivity metrics, and how they made a cultural shift to prioritize developer happiness and effectiveness. This conversation highlights the steps necessary to build a developer experience function that delivers meaningful impact.