When approaching building a dev console or dev portal, it is essential to understand the reason behind it rather than getting caught up in concerns about productivity or measuring value. Entrepreneurs often learn from others' experiences and warnings but should also embrace the cycle of passing on knowledge. The key advice is to focus on deriving intrinsic value and relying on engineer satisfaction instead of getting bogged down by metrics.
In this episode we’re joined by Adam Rogal, who leads Developer Productivity and Platform at DoorDash. Adam describes DoorDash’s journey with their internal developer portal, and gives advice for other teams looking to follow a similar path. Adam also describes how his team delivered value quickly and drove adoption for their developer platform.
Discussion points:
- (1:47) Why DoorDash explored implementing a developer portal
- (6:59) The initial vision for the developer portal
- 12:19 Funding ongoing development
- 16:01 Deciding what to include in the portal
- 19:15 Coming up with a name for the portal
- 20:01 Advice for interested beginners
- 23:55 Putting together a business case
- 32:32 Getting adoption for the portal
- 37:27 Driving initial awareness
- 41:29 Getting feedback from developers
- 48:33 What Adam would have done differently
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