Accelerating engineering velocity at Block
Block's vision and roadmap for driving engineering velocity.
Welcome to the latest issue of Engineering Enablement, a weekly newsletter sharing research and perspectives on developer productivity.
A key theme of this newsletter is to explore different approaches to measuring and improving developer productivity. In today's issue, we hear from Azra Coburn, Head of Developer Experience at Block, who shares what Block is doing to drive engineering velocity.
Block has recently invested in three major projects to drive velocity: establishing golden paths for standardized development workflows, optimizing local development environments for faster feedback loops, and integrating AI tools to automate routine tasks. In this post, Azra explains why they prioritized these specific initiatives and how exactly they’re approaching each one.
Here’s Azra.
Block is an ecosystem of brands that includes Square, Cash App, Spiral and TIDAL. All of our brands are united by our shared purpose of economic empowerment. We are creating tools to help expand access to the economy.
I lead our Developer Experience team — part of the broader engineering function — which empowers our developers across all of these brands to innovate rapidly and deliver high-quality products to market efficiently. We see our developer platform as one of our key competitive advantages, enabling us to lead the industry by quickly adapting to market demands.
From an engineering perspective, our scale is our biggest challenge and greatest opportunity. We have built great products that our customers love. We experienced fast growth, and with that growth we hired more and more engineers and told them to write more and more code. Then we acquired some companies and, before we knew it, our engineering footprint also grew.
Over time, dependencies became outdated, technology approaches advanced and changed, and we began to lose our shared understanding. We started to see divergence and inefficiencies across our brands in terms of developer tooling, platforms, and technology stacks.
Where historically teams worked independently and adopted or built tooling specific to their needs, today we have thousands of complex and interconnected systems. We have over 4,000 engineers contributing daily, serving the needs of our global customer base. Cash App has more than 50 million monthly active users, and in Q3 alone Square processed $60 billion in payments.
Our opportunity was to build a first-in-class developer platform at scale that enables our business to operate at the velocity of a startup. Nine months ago, we created a developer experience team whose mission is exactly that. This was done to support the growth of our business and empower our developers to innovate fast with the best in class tools, optimising for low barrier to entry, fast feedback loops, developer self service and uniformity.
Here, I’ll cover how we’re approaching engineering velocity improvements at Block.
Setting the roadmap
When it comes to building our developer experience strategy, our approach is first and foremost to listen.
Since the formation of Block’s Developer Experience organization, we have heavily invested in giving developers a voice. One of our key tools for this is the developer survey we conduct across our entire engineering organization.
Engineering velocity is a strategic priority for us. Our team conducts a quarterly survey using DX to benchmark and understand what’s working well and where we can drive continuous improvements in developer velocity. This data provides insights to help leaders and teams identify, implement, and measure efforts to improve engineering velocity, effectiveness, and efficiency.
Our developer experience strategy is driven by what we hear from our customers, i.e., our engineers. The quarterly survey that we run directly contributes to our roadmap and helps decide how we invest and prioritize. Today we are investing heavily in an Instant Developer Environment, developer tooling, converging on golden paths and, of course, AI for engineering velocity.
Additionally, because we value openness, we've opened the developer survey results up to everyone. As everyone's survey and everyone's tool for betterment, we get incredibly high response rates; in the last survey alone we had an 87% response rate.
Every engineer has access to their team's DX data and everyone else's data, as well as benchmarks against our key industry peers. This way our engineering community is empowered to make any adjustments or improvements that they see fit.
To communicate our progress, our team puts together an annual internal State of Engineering Velocity report that highlights key metrics and initiatives. This five-page report is distributed to everyone within Block’s engineering organization, covering topics including:
Key findings from our data, and the biggest opportunities we see
How we define and measure engineering velocity
How our metrics stack up against industry peers
Planned areas of investment
We find there is no single metric that can convey engineering velocity. Our data collection focuses on measuring key dimensions of developer experience and productivity which we have nicknamed DEVIQ. They represent developer experience, velocity, impact, and quality. We track these metrics across Block, down to the team-level, allowing us to measure and communicate how improvements to developer productivity are impacting the business.
Our vision
Our vision is to build a first-in-class developer platform at scale that enables our business to operate at the velocity of a startup. We want to empower our engineers to innovate rapidly at scale with the best-in-class tools. There are multiple components to this vision, most notable being our Instant Developer Environment (InstantDev), golden paths, and AI-enhanced engineering productivity.
Instant developer environments
A key pillar of our developer experience strategy is our InstantDev vision, which is focused on building a best-in-class internal developer platform.
To deliver on this vision, we’re creating a collection of developer tools that are turnkey. We recognise the importance of having development environments that have a low barrier to entry and allow for fast feedback loops, which is why our instant dev environments include fast local builds, projects that are self-bootstrapping or hermetic, and services that can be run ephemerally.
Our overarching goal is to ensure Block’s developers have full control over their development environments, with the platform teams offering fast, easy, and intuitive tooling and services. Maintaining ecosystem coherence, where packages and tooling just work seamlessly together is key and this is where our team, Developer Experience, plays a key role.
While maintaining ecosystem coherence, developers can install specific libraries and tools tailored to their projects, allowing for a customized workflow. This approach is deliberate and it allows for experimentation and shared learnings with different configurations and software versions.
Investing in golden paths
We’re heavily focused on establishing golden paths. By consolidating our toolchain down to a small number of focused investments, we create leverage. Having fewer tools means that we can invest more in making each one higher-quality, well-supported, and reliable.
One specific goal of ours is to reduce time spent on information search and discovery, which we estimate could save up to 200,000 hours of developer time annually. We’re consolidating all of our documentation into one platform across Block, heavily supported with AI, to streamline information search and discovery.
Leveraging AI
AI sits at the cornerstone of our developer experience strategy. Through our AI-native instant developer environment, we are actively embedding AI in all engineering workflows. Our goal is to increase speed to market by 10x and improve efficiency across all aspects of software development. For example, most recently, we have built an AI migrator tool. Migrations from legacy codebases that used to take teams months to complete can now be done in days.
We have launched an open-source AI Agent, Codename Goose. Engineers can use Goose to pull Jira tickets, automatically create pull requests, and even pre-fill them with code. Unlike other tools that simply generate code, Goose acts as a full agent—developers can assign it tasks, and it delivers results.
AI also allows us to achieve accelerated innovation, we are building tools that allow for quick iterations and simulations, allowing teams to refine concepts faster without extensive physical prototyping.
We expect our efforts in AI to drive a 30% boost in engineering velocity while significantly improving reliability and employee engagement. By automating bottlenecks, we are enabling engineers to focus on innovation.
We’re just getting started
Delivering on our ambitious vision does not happen overnight. Each quarter, we find where the biggest pain points are, and we tackle those problems incrementally while staying aligned to our broader vision.
If you’re interested in joining our mission of enabling Block’s engineering teams to innovate rapidly, we’re hiring so please reach out!
That’s it for this week, thanks for reading. If you’re enjoying this newsletter, consider sharing it.
-Abi
P.S. DX CTO Laura and I are hosting a virtual discussion on March 24th about setting goals around developer productivity metrics. Learn more and register to join us here.