Engineering Enablement by DX

Ana Petkovska, currently leading the developer experience team at Nexthink, talks about her team's transformation from DevOps to EngProd to DevEx. She shares her inspiration from Google's engineering productivity team and explains how she convinced her company to invest in EngProd. Ana discusses the challenges of optimizing team size and the importance of developing a mission for the team. She also explores the concept of Devx (Developer Experience) and the specific changes made in her team for a better digital employee experience.

Abi Noda chats with Grant Jenks from LinkedIn about their developer insights platform, iHub. They discuss qualitative versus quantitative metrics, choosing the right metrics, and using AI in developer productivity teams. Topics covered include winsorized means, composite scores, and the difficulties of answering simple questions.

Jim Beyers, VP of Engineering Enablement at CVS Health, discusses building an internal developer platform, aligning with transformation goals, defining strategy, leveraging GCP, team building, collaboration, and reporting progress.

Nils Loodin, Platform PM at Spotify, discusses unique challenges and recent changes in Spotify's platform organization. Topics include developer experience, team structure, focus of the Platform PM role, attracting PMs into Platform roles, and measuring onboarding.

Justin Wright and Matthew Dimich, leaders at Thomson Reuters, discuss the evolution of their organization's structure and approach. They cover topics such as founding the platform team, key initiatives, the value of enablement, marketing the enablement team's work, and managing requests vs proactive work.

Nathen Harvey from DORA at Google shares key findings from the State of DevOps Report. Topics include user-centric software development, impact of documentation on software delivery, reemergence of the Elite cluster, and the role of AI in software delivery.

Preeti Kota, Head of Engineering for Compass at Atlassian, discusses Atlassian's journey with developer experience and their newly released internal developer portal, Compass. They cover topics such as measuring DevEx, investments in improving developer productivity, metrics for self-serve documentation and dependency maintenance, survey programs, centralized teams, and the introduction of Atlassian Compass to solve information search for developers.

Mark Côté, Leader of the Developer Infrastructure organization at Shopify, shares insights about Shopify's developer survey program, including survey design, participation rates, and data interpretation. They discuss selecting and refining survey questions, analyzing results, and the value of targeted surveys. The podcast also explores the importance of surveys in improving developer productivity and the trust in survey data at Shopify.

Thomas Khalil, Head of Platform and SRE at Trivago, describes how the teams reporting into him are structured, the tactics they’re using to increase awareness of their work, and how they demonstrate their impact. Discussion points: (1:17) The pillars of the Central Platform organization(2:18) The organization’s focus on time to market and efficiency(3:09) The differences in developer experience between teams(4:37) Deciding whether to consolidate services(5:57) How platform, developer experience, observability, and SRE teams interact(8:40) How these problems were being tackled previously (10:09) A failed attempt at rolling out Backstage (13:48) How SRE squads are organized(15:39) How to motivate platform teams (17:23) Demonstrating the impact of the organization(18:42) How the data is collected(22:32) How they’re increasing awareness for their work (23:42) The DevEx pillar(25:46) How the DevEx roadshow will work (27:56) How DORA metrics fit into their measurement program Mentions and links: Connect with Thomas on LinkedIn

Jenny McClain, Leads R&D Team Enablement at Toast, discusses how her team enables individual teams at Toast to drive their productivity improvements. They cover topics such as team embedding, learning resources, staying connected with teams at scale, and the enablement function as a career path.