What drives companies to form Developer Productivity teams?
DoorDash, Lattice, Yelp, and others share what drove their decision to establish a DevProd team.
This is the latest issue of my newsletter. Each week I share research and perspectives on developer productivity.
Gartner reports that 78 percent of surveyed organizations have a formal developer productivity initiative either established or planned. Yet, one of the most frequent questions we get asked is how to go from zero to one. How do you establish a DevProd initiative or team if none exists in the organization today? And most critically, how do you get it funded?
We recently analyzed 20 companies to understand when they first established DevProd teams and what drove their decisions (click here to see the report). While there are many factors that affect the timing and decision to establish a DevProd team, all cases involved a specific project that pushed the organization over the edge.
To investigate this further, we interviewed 20 DevProd teams from companies like DoorDash, Lattice, and Yelp to understand what those projects were, and what the patterns were across different companies. This information provides insight and inspiration for leaders who are thinking about establishing DevProd teams or advocating for their organizations to do so.
Over 30% of the companies we interviewed started out by focusing on CI/CD, making this the most common initial focus area amongst the organizations we studied. This is consistent with what we have seen anecdotally – as companies grow, CI/CD frequently becomes a bottleneck in the delivery process that requires dedicated resources to solve. Furthermore, bottlenecks are often highly visible and acutely felt, thereby garnering leadership attention and investment more easily than other aspects of the developer experience.
Another common first project is the establishment of developer metrics and insights, including Developer Experience surveys. These initiatives are aimed at measuring developer productivity to help guide where further investment may be needed, as well as providing insights to senior leadership on the state of the union within their organizations.
While most projects on the list were similar, one unique initiative came from Mercury, which focused on improving the onboarding experience for new developers. This isn’t completely rare—in an interview, a leader at Peloton shared that onboarding was their initial project. However, it needs to have been identified as an area where there’s a significant opportunity for improving developer productivity.
Another notable project came from ThoughtSpot, which saw optimizing infrastructure as a way to improve developer productivity and open up new avenues for the business. They containerized their app, allowing developers to test code changes quickly and in a cloud-agnostic manner. This flexibility enabled them to scale across multiple clouds.
The table below distills our findings on what the most common first projects are for DevProd teams.
First-hand stories
Below are some stories from the Developer Productivity leaders we interviewed about what their first projects were and why they were chosen. These first-hand accounts underscore the nuances behind how these initial projects and initiatives actually got off the ground. For more first-hand stories about how these teams got started and their first projects, go here.
Lattice:
“I was hired to build out the function and team with a bunch of headcount and no direct reports (yet). While I was focusing on recruiting and hiring, I also kicked off the first project: “Project Aspirin” (“Your remediation for acute dev pain!”). I had two engineers borrowed from other teams to work together with me on various technical pain points that have piled up over time, specifically around CI velocity (e.g., remote build caching), speeding up our pnpm-based toolchain, and adding observability to detect flaky tests (among many other more minor improvements). We did this for two Sprints (2 weeks each), and the two engineers enjoyed working with me on these topics so much that both transferred full-time to my team afterward.”
Extend:
“Early on, we had picked a monorepo setup for all of our backend services. That choice eventually resulted in knots in our code that drastically degraded our developer experience. Our build and test process completion times were out of control. The job of fixing this issue required a dedicated team that would have some ownership over every one of our services. From this need the platform division and the developer experience team was born.”
Datavant:
“The theme for our first project has been "Golden Path.” There are two outcomes we’re aiming for: for engineers, to not worry about things they don’t have to. For platform, infra, security, devex: reducing toil and de-risking change. The actual projects for the two teams were: 1) the infrastructure focused team is rebuilding all of the kubernetes clusters and building "golden images" of blessed docker images. 2) The DevEx focused team is rebuilding all of the local developer environments in order to consolidate them and take advantage of the golden images.”
Thomson Reuters:
“The first goal was creating a consistent cloud landing zone for our applications to remain secure and follow best practices in cloud native application development. We partnered very closely with the first products we were building in the cloud to co-develop these standards and strategies to get started.”
Disney:
“The first infrastructure project was Rancher Kubernetes on AWS to host CI runners at scale. The first software project was an API built to orchestrate 4 separate CI/CD systems with self-service access to viewing commits to deployments.”
Key takeaways
The most common first projects are CI/CD tooling, cloud infrastructure, developer environments, and developer productivity metrics.
When starting out, it’s easiest to get buy-in for projects that solve acute pain points (e.g. slow build times) or that have clear value to executives (e.g. metrics).
See if you can borrow engineers from other teams for a set period of time (see Lattice’s story). This can help kickstart a DevProd initiative.
No two situations are identical, so choose projects based on your organization’s biggest challenges, and focus on getting the timing right.
Download the full report here for more first-hand stories about how these teams got started.
Who’s hiring right now
Here is a roundup of DevEx job openings. Find more open roles here.
CLEAR is hiring an Engineering Manager - Developer Experience | NY
Citi is hiring a Director - Engineering Excellence | TX
First American is hiring a Senior Product Manager - Platform | Remote
REI is hiring an Senior Manager - Platform Engineering | US
Snyk is hiring a VP, Engineering - Developer Experience | Boston, London
That’s it for this week. If you know someone who might like this issue, consider sharing it with them:
-Abi
This is a rare glimpse behind the scenes of these hyper-focused initiatives. Thanks for doing all this work to elucidate it for us!