When Anna Sulkina joined Airbnb to lead Developer Platform, there was a feeling amongst the team that they could be even more impactful if they were to become more focused and build better connections with external stakeholders. In this conversation, Anna shares this story and goes into the key changes they made. We cover:
Why they shifted their org structure to be focused on problems, not tools
How they clarified roles for PMs, EMs, and tech leads
How they defined their organization’s strategy
Other tactics that helped change the general perception about the team
What their measurement approach looks like today
The measurable improvements they’ve seen since making these changes
Listen now on Apple, Spotify, and YouTube.
Some takeaways:
Anna begins by sharing some helpful characteristics for being a developer productivity leader: deep developer empathy, experience building both end-user and internal tools, and a product mindset focused on real pain points. Strong communication and stakeholder management are just as critical as technical expertise.
When Anna joined Airbnb, the developer platform team felt they lacked clarity, operated somewhat in silos, and had overlapping roles across PMs, TPMs, and engineering leads. Teams were delivering great work, but without clear priorities or alignment, and stakeholders didn’t fully grasp the value of developer productivity. They tackled this by defining a clear strategy, restructuring teams around developer personas rather than tools, and formalizing stakeholder engagement through regular feedback loops, surveys, and advisory boards.
They restructured the org from a tool-centric model to a problem-focused approach, organizing teams into two pillars: platform-agnostic tooling (CI/CD, dev environments) and developer personas (iOS, Android, web). This shift encouraged teams to address broader developer needs rather than just optimizing individual tools, fostering collaboration on shared challenges like CI reliability and integration testing.
By clarifying how each role brought value to the company, Anna and her team were able to better define how PMs, tech leads, and EMs collaborated. Simply put, PMs own the “why,” tech leads the technical “how,” and EMs the organizational “how.” They also set clear expectations for different types of tech leads, ensuring alignment wasn’t just documented but actively reinforced in how teams worked together.
With roles clarified, Anna turned to defining overall strategy, starting with their mission: to maximize developer effectiveness by providing a reliable, easy-to-use platform for building and maintaining high-quality software at scale. She set four guiding principles: be developer-centric, simplify workflows, stay focused, and deliver incrementally, then structured the work into four focus areas: speeding up the inner loop, improving CI/CD, reducing cognitive load, and leveraging AI.
Under Anna’s leadership, developer experience at Airbnb has seen double-digit percentage improvements year over year. She says a key driver has been the developer experience survey, now run twice a year with results shared transparently across the org. By consistently gathering feedback, acting on pain points, and showing measurable progress, the team has built trust and momentum.
Anna and her team transformed Airbnb’s developer experience survey into a key decision-making tool. They refined it with industry research, partnered with senior ICs, making them collaborators rather than just stakeholders, and ensured historical continuity. This approach built empathy for the complexity of measuring productivity while incorporating valuable insights. They also improved reporting by slicing data by org level, giving leaders clearer visibility into their teams. A new tech culture section helped measure focus time and goal clarity, making the data even more actionable.
In this episode we cover:
(0:00) Intro
(1:40) Skills that make a great developer productivity leader
(4:36) Challenges in how the team operated previously
(10:49) Changing the platform org’s focus and structure
(16:04) Clarifying roles for EM’s, PM’s, and tech leads
(20:22) How Airbnb defined its infrastructure org’s strategy
(28:23) Improvements they’ve seen, as measured by developer sentiment
(32:13) The evolution of Airbnb’s developer experience survey
Referenced:
Follow Anna on LinkedIn
Read the Airbnb Tech blog
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