Chris Westerhold

Thoughtworks Head of Developer Experience, Chris Westerhold, discusses the rising interest in developer portals, pitfalls to avoid, building vs. buying, driving value, and common mistakes. Explore the evolution of internal developer portals and strategies for optimizing success in this insightful conversation.

Chris Westerhold, Global Practice Director at ThoughtWorks, reveals how engineering teams often ship more code but deliver less business impact. He discusses the hidden waste in engineering processes and why a clear 'North Star' is essential for aligning efforts with business goals. Chris emphasizes that efficiency issues stem from people and processes, not just technology. He advocates for a systems thinking approach to foster real improvement while balancing developer freedom with standardization, ultimately unlocking a team's true potential.

Chris Westerhold, Global Practice Director at ThoughtWorks, and Abhi Noda, CEO and co-founder of DX, dive into the complexities of measuring AI's impact on developer productivity. They discuss the challenges of evaluating knowledge-worker outputs and the importance of balancing leading and lagging metrics. The duo debates the quality trade-offs of AI-generated code and emphasizes prioritizing people and processes over tools in engineering. Finally, they outline practical steps for effective metric adoption and the anticipated insights from the upcoming DORA report.