Engineering Enablement by DX

Max Kanat-Alexander and Or Michael Berlowitz discuss gathering real-time and periodic feedback from developers. They cover listening channels, volume metrics, building surveys, handling results, and the real-time feedback tool. They share experiences, advice, and insights on implementing this approach for developer engagement.

Mark Côté, Director of Engineering of Developer Infrastructure at Shopify, explains an exercise the Infrastructure group went through to define their boundaries of work. He shares their areas of focus, the team’s guiding principles, how they use their developer happiness survey to decide what to prioritize, and more. —Discussion points: (0:48) Mark's background(1:43) How the Developer Acceleration org is structured(4:43) The Infrastructure team's chart(5:35) Three opportunities for impact(7:49) Identifying the opportunities for impact(10:51) Why they created a charter(17:34) Infrastructure's guiding principles(19:32) How they decide what to focus on(21:44) Why they don't have product managers(24:17) Ideas for reducing cognitive load(29:05) Balancing customer requests with strategic roadmap items(32:08) How Shopify's Developer Happiness survey works(35:32) Who is involved in the Dev Happiness survey(36:51) The survey's sampling strategy(37:30) How the survey's results are used(38:32) The survey's participation rate (39:31) Steps they take after the survey(42:52) Advice for others starting a developer acceleration team—Mentions and links:Follow Mark on LinkedInRead blog posts written by members of Shopify's Developer Acceleration team

Utsav Shah, who leads Platform at Vanta and previously led Developer Effectiveness at Dropbox, shares the story of Dropbox’s journey with measuring developer productivity. Utsav discusses what he learned about both system and survey-based measures, his opinion on the usefulness of common Git metrics, and more. 

Michael Galloway (Doma and ex-Netflix) describes his process for interviewing developers to understand where his team should focus. He also explains how he thinks about the strategic value of a Platform team. Resources mentioned: Customer Interview GuideCustomer Interview Questions

In this episode, Willie Yao, Head of Infrastructure at Notion and former Head of Developer Infrastructure at Airbnb, provides a unique perspective on how Developer Experience teams work in hypergrowth companies. He shares how Airbnb developed a customer-first mindset internally, what it took to get Airbnb’s leadership invested in that effort, and how he’s approaching DevEx at Notion today. 

Jasmine James, Senior Engineering Manager at Twitter, discusses how her team manages support requests, prioritizes based on personas, and presents the ROI. They also explore optimizing workflows, driving developer experience at the VP level, and creating a customer-oriented mindset.

In this special episode, Dr. Nicole Forsgren, author of award-winning book Accelerate and co-author of "The SPACE of Developer Productivity", talks about her work with DORA, the inspiration behind the SPACE framework, and how she's thinking about developer experience.Watch the on-demand fireside chat or read the announcement of Nicole joining DX as a strategic advisor. 

Brent Strange, Director of Engineering Excellence at GoDaddy, has a unique perspective on the role of an internal enablement team because he focuses more on the people and processes instead of tooling. Here he shares his perspective on org structure, as well as the role of agile coaches and his response to some of the negative views that exist towards Agile. 

Sylvestor George (Staff Software Engineer on Slack’s Internal Tools Team) led a project to move the entire development experience to remote environments, which was widely regarded as a “dramatically better experience”. Here he shares the full story of that project, including how they identified the problem, the solution they created, and how they convinced engineers to adopt the new workflow. 

In this episode Abi Noda is joined by Crystal Hirschorn, who leads Platform Infrastructure, SRE, and Developer Experience at Snyk. In their conversation, Crystal shares the story behind the recently founded Developer experience group, including why they named the team Developer Experience, how she calculates the cost of the problems they solve, and how they partner with engineering teams.