Engineering Enablement by DX

Max Kanat-Alexander, the Tech Lead for the Developer Productivity and Insights Team at LinkedIn, shares an inside look at LinkedIn’s metrics platform and how teams across the organization use it. Discussion points:  (1:31) Why Max shares how his team is measuring productivity (3:20) Why some teams use metrics and some don’t  (6:03) The types of metrics Max’s team focuses on (12:59) The role of TPM...

Mike Fisher, the former CTO at Etsy, spearheaded a multi-year developer experience initiative aimed at improving developer happiness and efficiency during his time at Etsy. Here, he shares the story of that initiative, including the pillars of the program and the investment that went into it. Towards the end of the conversation, Mike also shares his perspective on measuring developer productivity....

Karl’s team at American Airlines were early adopters of Backstage, and in this episode he shares their journey of implementing and rolling out a developer portal. He also describes two of the extensions his team has built for their portal. Discussion points: (1:24) Where the idea of building a developer portal came from (7:24) What the developer experience looked like before the portal  (10:41) In...

As product lead, Russ Nealis has been focused on introducing the discipline of product management in the Developer Foundations organization. This episode discusses the reasons why PMs are currently uncommon in platform organizations, examples of when having a PM has been helpful, and more. Discussion points: (1:23) Russ’s role at Plaid  (2:49) Why platform product managers are uncommon (3:28) Back...

In this deep-dive episode, Brian Scanlan, Principal Systems Engineer at Intercom, describes how the company’s on-call process works. He explains how the process started and key changes they’ve made over the years, including a new volunteer model, changes to compensation, and more. Discussion points: (1:28) How on-call started at Intercom (10:11) Brian’s background and interest in being on-call (14...

Jack Li explains how his production engineering team rolled out a new incident review process, how they’ve made the case for investing in reliability, and specific tools his team has built to improve reliability. — Discussion points: (1:25) How Jack became interested in reliability  (3:24) Where the Instagram Reels team fits into the broader organization (4:05) What Jack’s team focuses on (4:55) T...

Nathen Harvey, who leads DORA at Google, explains what DORA is, how it has evolved in recent years, the common challenges companies face as they adopt DORA metrics, and where the program may be heading in the future. — Discussion points: (1:48) What DORA is today and how it exists within Google (3:37) The vision for Google and DORA coming together (5:20) How the DORA research program works (7:53)...

This week's guest is Dr. Margaret-Anne Storey, who goes by the name Peggy. Peggy is a professor of Computer Science at the University of Victoria, the Chief Scientist at DX, and co-author of the SPACE Framework, which is the topic of focus in this episode. Today’s conversation discusses what the SPACE framework is and what went into developing the metrics and categories. Peggy also shares where sh...

This week’s guest is Jeremiah Lee, who was previously a manager at Stripe and product manager at Spotify. This conversation focuses on org structure, and specifically Jeremiah’s experience with the popular squad model from Spotify. Jeremiah provides the backstory on where the model came from, what parts of the model were a challenge, and advice for leaders either already adopting the model or cons...

Jean-Michel Lemieux, former CTO of Shopify and VP of Engineering at Atlassian, explains how to advocate for investing in platform work, which projects to fund, and what distinguishes a great platform leader.  — Discussion points: (1:38) Jean-Michel’s definition of platform work  (6:44) Why reliability, performance, and stability do fall within platform work  (7:24) The consequences of lacking a pr...

Jonathan Biddle, Director of Engineering Effectiveness at Wayfair, shares the story of how his team found repeat success and subsequently grew in size and scope. He shares lessons they’ve borrowed from startups, including understanding the adoption curve and knowing your core users, and offers advice for other platform teams looking to move to the next stage. — Discussion points: (01:15) How Jonat...

Ian White, Director of Platform Engineering at DAT, joined the company to scale their Kubernetes-based cloud infrastructure, which has come under stress as their business has grown over the past couple years. Here he shares how he partnered with developers to learn about their challenges, how we conveyed a vision for how the company needed to evolve, and how he’s been working with development team...

Brian Guthrie, co-founder and CTO at Orgspace and former VP of Engineering at Meetup, has the unique experience of having previously decommissioned his Platform team. In this episode, Brian talks about that story openly, and shares advice for Platform teams to make sure they’re well positioned within their organizations. Discussion points: Brian’s background and story at Meetup - [00:02:20] Brian’...

Max Kanat-Alexander and Or Michael Berlowitz (Berlo), share how they gather both periodic and real-time feedback from developers. Discussion points: Overview of the listening channels used by Max and Berlo’s team - [00:00:58] Origin story of the Developer Engagement and Insights team - [00:02:49] Perspectives on volume metrics - [00:05:00] How the periodic surveys work - [00:08:51] Investment requ...

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 Accelerat...

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 Guide Customer 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. 

Twitter’s Developer Experience team is more mature than most. Here, Jasmine James , a Senior Engineering Manager - Developer Experience, explains how her team manages support requests, why they consider personas as part of their prioritization, and how they present the ROI of the team’s work. 

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.

Max Pugliese , formerly the Director of Developer Experience at IBM, offers a look at what it’s like to support tens of thousands of engineers. He explains why it’s important to think about the culture and processes surrounding the tooling changes a team tries to implement, how to stay close to developers, and more. 

In this episode Abi speaks with Jelmer Borst, Product Manager for Picnic Technologies’ Platform group. Jelmer explains what the value is of having a PM in an internal-facing team, and shares his process for gathering feedback from developers to understand where they’re experiencing friction.