Engineering Enablement by Abi Noda (DX)
Explorez tous les épisodes de Engineering Enablement by Abi Noda
| Date | Titre | Durée | |
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| 05 Apr 2023 | Implementing a developer portal | Karl Haworth (American Airlines) | 00:54:09 | |
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:
Mentions and links: | |||
| 13 Sep 2022 | A model for managing requests and complaints from developers | Jasmine James (Twitter) | 00:28:28 | |
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. | |||
| 27 Feb 2024 | Bootstrapping a developer portal | Adam Rogal (DoorDash) | 00:54:43 | |
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:
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| 29 Mar 2023 | Bringing the product management discipline to platform teams | Russ Nealis (Plaid) | 00:45:11 | |
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:
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| 01 Sep 2022 | From DORA to SPACE to DX - A Fireside Chat with Nicole Forsgren | 00:31:21 | |
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. | |||
| 23 Apr 2024 | How Slack fully automates deploys and anomaly detection with Z-scores | Sean Mcllroy (Slack) | 00:33:49 | |
Click here to view the episode transcript. Mentions and links:
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| 04 Jan 2023 | How much to invest in platform work | Jean-Michel Lemieux (Shopify, Atlassian) | 00:52:45 | |
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 product mindset in platform (9:20) Why and how to advocate for investing 50% of R&D spend in platform work (12:31) How Jean-Michel arrived at 50% as the percentage of R&D spend that should be allocated to platform (16:09) Jean-Michel’s experiences with different levels of investment in platform work (21:59) What percentage of platform investment should go towards keep the lights on work (24:01) Whether the allocation changes at different company stages (27:05) Why platform work is consistently underinvested in (29:00) Why having a platform team could be an anti-pattern (32:32) How to advocate for this work to leaders (35:35) What it looks like to over-invest in platform work (40:03) How to decide which initiatives to invest in (47:41) Making build vs buy decisions in platform work (49:58) What distinguishes a great platform leader — Mentions and links: | |||
| 18 Oct 2023 | Atlassian’s journey with developer experience | Preeti Kota (Atlassian) | 00:44:55 | |
This week we’re joined by Preeti Kota, the Head of Engineering for Compass at Atlassian. Preeti walks us through Atlassian’s journey with developer experience: including how they measure DevEx, and how they drive improvements through efforts at both the organization and team levels. Preeti also talks about how this journey has led to the development of Atlassian’s newly released internal developer portal, Compass. Mentions and links:
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| 04 Aug 2022 | Snyk’s journey with developer experience and productivity | Crystal Hirschorn (Snyk) | 00:33:13 | |
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. | |||
| 03 Jan 2024 | Measuring developer productivity at Airbnb | Christopher Sanson (Airbnb) | 00:40:57 | |
Christopher Sanson is a product manager at Airbnb who is dedicated to enhancing developer productivity and tooling. Today, we learn more about Airbnb's developer productivity team and how various teams use metrics, both within and outside the organization. From there, we dive even deeper into their measurement journey, highlighting their implementation of DORA metrics and the challenges they overcame throughout the process. Discussion points:
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| 16 Aug 2023 | Enabling teams to drive their own productivity improvements | Jenny McClain (Toast) | 00:43:36 | |
This week’s guest is Jenny McClain, who leads R&D Team Enablement at Toast. Jenny’s team focuses on enabling individual teams at Toast to drive their own productivity improvements, and this conversation dives into how they tackle this problem. Discussion points:
Mentions and links: Working Agreements template from Steve Sobel, Director of Engineering at Toast - one of the resources featured in Toast’s Team Health Toolkit | |||
| 26 Mar 2024 | 10 years of driving developer productivity at Yelp | Kent Wills (Yelp) | 00:45:14 | |
Click here to listen to the episode transcript.
Mentions and Links
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| 08 Nov 2023 | Evolving platform and enablement at Thomson Reuters | Justin Wright, Matthew Dimich (Thomson Reuters) | 00:41:18 | |
This week we’re joined by Justin Wright and Matthew Dimich, who lead Platform Engineering and Engineering Enablement at Thomson Reuters. Justin and Matt give an inside look at how they’ve evolved their organization’s structure and approach over the past 8 years. Discussion points:
Mentions and links:
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| 21 May 2024 | DORA, SPACE, and DevEx: Choosing the right framework | Laura Tacho + Abi Noda | 00:39:35 | |
Click here to view the episode transcript'. Mentions and Links: Discussion points:
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| 11 Jan 2023 | Spotify’s failed #SquadGoals | Jeremiah Lee (Spotify, Stripe) | 00:43:33 | |
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 considering doing so. Discussion points: (1:40) What the Spotify model is (4:39) Jeremiah’s impression of the Spotify model as he joined the company (7:29) Spotify’s progress in adopting the model as Jeremiah joined (9:55) Challenges with matrix management (12:02) The role of engineering managers (14:40) What the model was designed to solve (15:54) Good autonomy versus toxic autonomy (18:51) How Agile coaches were used at Spotify (21:39) Advice for teams who are struggling to implement the Spotify model (24:50) Advice for leaders who are starting to think about org design (27:30) How Stripe approached org structure (30:26) How org structure affects a platform team’s work (33:32) Tracking engineering org structures (36:02) Why the squad model became so popular (39:37) What the original authors may have felt about the popularity of the model Mentions and links: Follow Jeremiah on LinkedIn Jeremiah’s Spotify’s Failed #SquadGoals The original whitepaper on the Spotify model: Scaling Agile at Spotify Team Topologies by Matthew Skelton and Manuel Pais Essential Scrum by Kenneth S. Rubin | |||
| 25 Oct 2024 | Platform team challenges, realigning on DevEx, and change management | 00:34:21 | |
Click here to view the episode transcript.
Discussion points:
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| 07 Dec 2022 | Positioning platform work in a down market | Brian Guthrie (Orgspace, Meetup) | 00:34:22 | |
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.
Follow Brian:
Mentions and links:
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| 20 Dec 2022 | Principles for driving adoption and platform team growth | Jonathan Biddle (Wayfair) | 00:50:05 | |
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. — (05:30) Why Platforms teams are in a position of leverage, but also ambiguity (07:18) The initial work Jonathan’s team focused on (10:07) Creating transactional versus recurring value (11:36) The difference between startups and platform teams (14:12) Expanding the team’s scope and rebranding to Developer Acceleration (18:20) What drove the platform team’s success (21:05) Three adoption concepts to understand (24:41) Knowing your core customers (27:36) Adoption metrics and feedback gathering mechanisms (33:37) When to mandate adoption or rely on organic adoption (38:38) A story of when adoption fell short — Mentions and links: | |||
| 12 Oct 2022 | Dropbox's journey with developer productivity metrics | Utsav Shah (Vanta, Dropbox) | 00:44:37 | |
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. | |||
| 18 Jan 2023 | An inside look at the SPACE framework | Dr. Margaret-Anne Storey (co-author, SPACE) | 00:37:48 | |
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 she sees this line of research heading next. —
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| 06 Jul 2022 | Common pitfalls in adopting engineering metrics | Mojtaba Hosseini (Zapier) | 00:46:03 | |
In this interview, Mojtaba Hosseini (Director of Engineering at Zapier) talks about how to approach using metrics, pitfalls teams run into, and the common evolution teams go through as they adopt metrics. | |||
| 09 Apr 2024 | What’s up with internal developer portals? | Chris Westerhold (Thoughtworks) | 00:36:13 | |
Click here to view the episode transcript. Mentions and Links
Time Stamps:
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| 20 Apr 2022 | How DoorDash’s developer productivity team prioritizes projects | Marco Chirico (DoorDash) | 00:22:29 | |
In this episode, Marco Chirico shares the strategies DoorDash’s Developer Productivity group uses to prioritize their work. He also explains how the Developer Productivity group has evolved over time, and how they measure their success today. Useful links:
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| 12 May 2022 | What it looks like to hire Engineering Effectiveness too late | Peter Seibel (ex-Twitter) | 00:38:20 | |
In this episode Abi talks with Peter Seibel. Peter previously was the Director of Engineering for the Democratic National Committee, and before that led Twitter’s Engineering Effectiveness (EE) team. In this interview, Peter reflects on his experience at Twitter, sharing why it’s better to invest in EE early and his vision for how EE teams can fulfill their potential. Useful links:
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| 08 Mar 2023 | Intercom’s approach to a great on-call experience | Brian Scanlan (Intercom) | 01:10:24 | |
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:
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| 24 May 2023 | A close look at Peloton’s developer experience survey | Thansha Sadacharam (Peloton) | 00:58:34 | |
Thansha Sadacharam, who leads Tech Learning and Insights at Peloton walks us through the journey of building the company’s developer experience survey. She shares what went into the survey’s design, rollout, and maintenance, as well as the different teams involved.
Mentions and links Follow Thansha on LinkedIn | |||
| 13 Dec 2023 | Leading a DevEx team through transformation | Ana Petkovska (Nexthink) | 00:26:35 | |
In this episode, Abi speaks with Ana Petkovska, who is currently leading the developer experience team at Nexthink. Ana takes us through her journey of leading a DevOps team that underwent multiple transformations. She explains how her team went from being a DevOps team to EngProd and eventually DevEx. Ana elaborates on her team's challenges and the reasons behind the shift in focus. She also shares how she discovered EngProd and used data from companies like Google to convince her company to invest in EngProd. Finally, Ana explains how DevEx came into the picture and changed how her team approaches and measures their work. Discussion points:
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| 23 Jun 2022 | Why founding a DevEx team is like starting a startup | Minh Pham, Titus Stone (Ibotta) | 00:39:29 | |
In this episode we’re joined by Minh Pham and Titus Stone from Ibotta’s Developer Experience team. You’ll hear their story about how the DX team came into existence, why they view a DX team as a “startup within a startup”, and their vision for what DX at Ibotta will become. | |||
| 26 Apr 2023 | How teams use productivity metrics at LinkedIn | Max Kanat-Alexander (LinkedIn, Google) | 00:53:19 | |
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:
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| 13 Apr 2022 | How GitHub’s developer experience team has evolved | Liz Saling (GitHub) | 00:43:06 | |
Liz Saling, Director of Engineering at GitHub, shares the story of how the Developer Experience group was founded and why GitHub paused features for a quarter to focus on making developer experience improvements. Helpful links:
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| 02 Aug 2023 | How Google measures developer productivity | Ciera Jaspan, Collin Green (Google) | 01:14:12 | |
This week we’re joined by Ciera Jaspan and Collin Green, who lead the Engineering Productivity Research team at Google. Ciera and Collin have written several papers from studies they’ve conducted, and this discussion covers the insights from their research as well as their work more broadly at Google. Discussion points:
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| 25 Jan 2023 | A masterclass on DORA – research program, common pitfalls, and future direction | Nathen Harvey (Google) | 00:54:45 | |
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. —
(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) Who participates in the DORA survey (9:28) How the industry benchmarks are identified (11:05) How the reports have evolved over recent years (13:55) How reliability is measured (15:19) Why the 2022 report didn’t have an Elite category (17:11) The new Slowing, Flowing, and Retiring clusters (19:25) How to think about applying the benchmarks (20:45) Challenges with how DORA metrics are used (24:02) Why comparing teams’ DORA metrics is an antipattern (26:18) Why ‘industry’ doesn’t matter when comparing organizations to benchmarks (29:32) Moving beyond DORA metrics to optimize organizational performance (30:56) Defining different DORA metrics (36:27) Measuring deployment frequency at the team level, not the organizational level (38:29) The capabilities: there’s more to DORA than the four metrics (43:09) How DORA and SPACE are related (47:58) DORA’s capabilities assessment tool (49:26) Where DORA is heading
Follow Nathen on LinkedIn or Twitter Engineering Enablement episode with Dr. Nicole Forsgren Bryan Finster’s How to Use & Abuse DORA Metrics (and Abi’s summary of the paper) Engineering Enablement episode with Dr. Margaret-Anne Storey Join the DORA community for discussion and events: dora.community | |||
| 30 Nov 2022 | A deep-dive on real-time feedback and personalized surveys | Max Kanat-Alexander, Or Michael Berlowitz (LinkedIn) | 00:46:40 | |
Max Kanat-Alexander and Or Michael Berlowitz (Berlo), share how they gather both periodic and real-time feedback from developers. Discussion points:
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| 07 May 2024 | The science behind DORA | Derek DeBellis (Google) | 00:47:50 | |
Click here to view the episode transcript. Mentions and Links:
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| 22 Nov 2023 | Building an internal developer platform at CVS Health | Jim Beyers (CVS Health) | 00:31:08 | |
This week's episode is with Jim Beyers, VP of Engineering Enablement at CVS Health. Jim joined CVS a year ago to lead an effort to build an internal developer platform. Abi and Jim discuss how Jim joined CVS to build an internal developer platform, what brought him to the job, and how the developer experience fits into the broader transformation goals of CVS. Additionally, this episode covers building the team, defining a strategy, and how he's thinking about winning the hearts and minds across his organization. Discussion points:
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| 17 Jun 2022 | The ultimate guide on Engineering Operations | Ryan Atkins (Asana, Stripe, Dropbox) | 00:46:39 | |
In this episode Abi Noda speaks with Ryan Atkins, Asana’s Head of Engineering Operations. They talk about the role of EngOps and when it’s needed, founding an EngOps team, how these teams work in large companies, and more. | |||
| 26 Nov 2024 | SPACE framework, PRs per engineer, AI research | 00:32:14 | |
In this episode, Brian Houck, Applied Scientist, Developer Productivity at Microsoft, covers SPACE, DORA, and some specific metrics the developer productivity research team is finding useful. The conversation starts by comparing DORA and SPACE. Brian explains why activity metrics were included in the SPACE framework, then dives into one metric in particular: pull request throughput. Brian also describes another metric Microsoft is finding useful, and gives a preview into where his research is heading. Mentions and links
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| 13 Jul 2022 | The value of having a PM on a platform team | Jelmer Borst (Picnic Technologies) | 00:34:00 | |
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. | |||
| 02 May 2023 | The developer experience of building a database | Tara Hernandez (MongoDB, Google) | 00:39:36 | |
Tara Hernandez, the VP of Developer Productivity at MongoDB, joins the podcast to give an inside look at what the developer experience looks like at an organization that develops a database. Here, Tara shares what it looks like to develop, test, and release changes at MongoDB, while also providing insight into how the company invests in developer productivity more broadly. Discussion points:
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| 19 Jun 2024 | How SiriusXM revamped their platform and developer experience | Jared Wolinsky | 00:40:58 | |
Click here to view the episode transcript.
Timestamps:
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| 12 Jul 2023 | A customer service approach to improving DevEx | Jason Kennedy (One Medical) | 00:44:30 | |
This week we’re joined by Jason Kennedy, Senior Engineering Manager of Developer Experience at One Medical. Jason’s team takes a uniquely customer-driven approach to improving the developer experience, and in this episode he describes their philosophy and how it works in practice. Jason explains how they shadow developers, how they run surveys, and more. Discussion points:
Mentions and links: Book about Disney: Be Our Guest | |||
| 06 Dec 2023 | How LinkedIn defines and tracks key developer productivity metrics | Grant Jenks (LinkedIn) | 00:52:23 | |
In this episode, Abi chats with Grant Jenks, Senior Staff SWE, Engineering Insights @ LinkedIn. They dive into LinkedIn's developer insights platform, iHub, and its backstory. The conversation covers qualitative versus quantitative metrics, sharing concerns about these terms and exploring their correlation. The episode wraps up with technical topics like winsorized means, thoughts on composite scores, and ways AI can benefit developer productivity teams. (1:10) Insights in the productivity space | |||
| 12 Dec 2024 | DX Core 4: Framework overview, key design principles, and practical applications | 00:36:59 | |
In this episode, Abi and Laura introduce the DX Core 4, a new framework designed to simplify how organizations measure developer productivity. They discuss the evolution of productivity metrics, comparing Core 4 with frameworks like DORA, SPACE, and DevEx, and emphasize its focus on speed, effectiveness, quality, and impact. They explore why each metric was chosen, the importance of balancing productivity measures with developer experience, and how Core 4 can help engineering leaders align productivity goals with broader business objectives. Mentions and Links: Discussion Points:
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| 17 Jul 2024 | Exploring Developer Productivity with AI: Insights from Airbnb, GitHub, and Jumio | 00:35:25 | |
Click here to view the episode transcript.
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| 04 Jun 2024 | Developer Experience at American Express | Michelle Swartz (American Express) | 00:45:00 | |
Click here to view the episode transcript'. Mentions and links Timestamps
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| 28 Jul 2022 | Supporting 100,000 engineers | Max Pugliese (IBM) | 00:31:01 | |
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. | |||
| 04 May 2022 | Tactics for driving service adoption | Varun Achar (Razorpay) | 00:36:41 | |
In this episode, Varun Achar (Director of Engineering at Razorpay) explains how the Platform org has grown from a 15-person team owning everything, to 3 separate subteams. He also shares how they think about creating a culture of productivity, and some of the tactics they’ve used for increasing service adoption. Helpful links:
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| 08 Jun 2022 | Staffing infrastructure teams | Will Larson (Calm, Stripe, Uber) | 00:40:33 | |
Will Larson, the CTO at Calm, covers a wide range of topics including whether Infrastructure Engineering is chronically understaffed, the role of Eng Ops, how his opinion on the “build vs buy” question has changed, his thoughts on metrics, and more. Helpful resources:
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| 16 Feb 2023 | How Instagram Reels manages reliability | Jack Li (Instagram, Shopify) | 00:56:28 | |
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. —
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| 22 Aug 2023 | Leading platform engineering at Trivago | Thomas Khalil (Trivago) | 00:30:52 | |
Thomas Khalil, Head of Platform and SRE at Trivago, describes how the teams reporting into him are structured, the tactics they’re using to increase awareness of their work, and how they demonstrate their impact. Discussion points:
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| 12 Nov 2024 | CTO buy-in, measuring sentiment, and customer focus | 00:58:04 | |
Click here to view the episode transcript. Mentions and links
Discussion Points
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| 28 Sep 2022 | Establishing a DevEx team in a high-growth company | Willie Yao (Notion, Airbnb) | 00:46:46 | |
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. | |||
| 08 Jan 2025 | DX Core 4: 2024 benchmarks | 00:28:20 | |
In this episode, Abi and Laura dive into the 2024 DX Core 4 benchmarks, sharing insights across data from 500+ companies. They discuss what these benchmarks mean for engineering leaders, how to interpret key metrics like the Developer Experience Index, and offer advice on how to best use benchmarking data in your organization. Mentions and Links:
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| 29 Jun 2022 | Advocating for the voice of the developer | Julio Santana (Workday) | 00:39:26 | |
Julio Santana from Workday shares how he thinks about the ideal scope of a Developer Experience team, getting buy-in for DX initiatives, how his team gathers feedback from developers, and more. | |||
| 13 Feb 2024 | A deep-dive on the Thoughtworks Tech Radar | Rebecca Parsons, Camilla Crispim, Erik Dörnenburg (Thoughtworks) | 00:45:36 | |
In this episode, Abi has a fascinating conversation with Rebecca Parsons, ThoughtWorks's CTO, Camilla Crispim, and Erik Dörnenburg on the ThoughtWorks Tech Radar. The trio begins with an overview of Tech Radar and its history before delving into the intricate process of creating each report involving multiple teams and stakeholders. The conversation concludes with a focus on the evolution of Tech Radar's design and process and potential future changes. This episode offers Tech Radar fans an exclusive behind-the-scenes look at its history and production. Discussion points:
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| 15 Nov 2023 | The Platform PM role at Spotify | Nils Loodin (Spotify) | 00:52:10 | |
This week we spoke with Nils Loodin, Platform Product Manager at Spotify. Nils describes how his role in platform product management works, including unique challenges, approaches, and career considerations. Nils also discusses some of the recent changes within Spotify's platform organization, including shifting teams from tech-centric to journey-centric. Discussion points:
Mentions and links:
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| 05 Oct 2022 | Using customer interviews to inform your roadmap | Michael Galloway (Doma, Netflix) | 00:43:14 | |
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. | |||
| 16 May 2023 | A better way to measure developer productivity | A special episode with Laura Tacho and Abi Noda | 01:08:29 | |
In this episode, Abi is interviewed by Laura Tacho about the new paper he co-authored with Dr. Nicole Forsgren, Dr. Margaret-Anne Storey, and Dr. Michaela Greiler. Abi and Laura discuss the pitfalls of some of the common metrics organizations use, and how the new paper builds on prior frameworks such as DORA and SPACE to offer a new approach to measuring and improving developer productivity. Discussion topics:
Read the new paper on ACM Queue Read Abi’s announcement about the new paper Read how top companies measure developer productivity Connect with Abi and Laura Sign up for Laura’s course, Measuring Development Team Performance Connect with Laura on LinkedIn or Twitter Connect with Abi on LinkedIn or Twitter | |||
| 26 May 2022 | Supporting autonomous teams | Victoria Morgan-Smith (Financial Times) | 00:35:18 | |
Joining us for this episode is Victoria Morgan-Smith, the Director of Delivery for Engineering Enablement at the Financial Times. Victoria shares some of the tradeoffs in having an autonomous, “you build it, you run it” culture. She also shares how her group equips engineering teams with metrics, best practices, and more. Follow Victoria on LinkedIn | |||
| 12 Mar 2024 | How “instructional engineers” improve developer onboarding at Splunk | Gail Carmichael (Splunk) | 00:39:31 | |
This week we’re joined by Gail Carmichael, Principal Instructional Engineer at Splunk. At Splunk, Gail’s team is responsible for improving developer onboarding, which they do through a multi-day learning program. Here, Gail shares how this program works and how they measure developer onboarding. The conversation also covers what instructional engineers are generally, and how Gail demonstrates the impact of her team’s work.
Mentions and Links
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| 26 Oct 2022 | How to define your team's scope and charter | Mark Côté (Shopify) | 00:45:41 | |
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 Acceleration org is structured (4:43) The Infrastructure team's chart (5:35) Three opportunities for impact (7:49) Identifying the opportunities for impact (10:51) Why they created a charter (17:34) Infrastructure's guiding principles (19:32) How they decide what to focus on (21:44) Why they don't have product managers (24:17) Ideas for reducing cognitive load (29:05) Balancing customer requests with strategic roadmap items (32:08) How Shopify's Developer Happiness survey works (35:32) Who is involved in the Dev Happiness survey (36:51) The survey's sampling strategy (37:30) How the survey's results are used (38:32) The survey's participation rate (39:31) Steps they take after the survey (42:52) Advice for others starting a developer acceleration team — Mentions and links:
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| 13 Jun 2023 | Behind the scenes with Extend’s developer experience team | Matthew Schrepel and Luke Patterson (Extend) | 00:59:40 | |
Matthew and Luke lead Extend’s Developer Experience team, a team that has approached their work in a way that is more forward-thinking than most. In this episode, they cover how they deliver impact at multiple levels of the organization, their journey with productivity metrics, and how they’ve made DevEx a C-level concern. Discussion points:
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| 24 Aug 2022 | The people side of engineering and an open conversation about Agile | Brent Strange (GoDaddy) | 00:32:20 | |
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. | |||
| 31 Jan 2024 | Measuring and rolling out AI coding assistants | Eirini Kalliamvakou (GitHub) | 00:47:43 | |
This week's guest is Eirini Kalliamvakou, a staff researcher at GitHub focused on AI and developer experience. Eirini sits at the forefront of research into GitHub Copilot. Abi and Eirini discuss recent research on how AI coding assistance impacts developer productivity. They talk about how leaders should build business cases for AI tools. They also preview what's to come with AI tools and implications for how developer productivity is measured.
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| 19 Apr 2023 | Inside Etsy’s multi-year DevEx initiative | Mike Fisher (Etsy, PayPal) | 00:52:40 | |
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. Discussion points:
Mentions and links: Subscribe to Mike’s newsletter, Fish Food for Thought | |||
| 25 Oct 2023 | Key findings from the 2023 State of Devops Report | Nathen Harvey (DORA at Google) | 00:45:59 | |
This week’s episode dives into the DORA research program and this year’s State of DevOps Report. Nathen Harvey, who leads DORA at Google, shares the key findings from the research and what’s changed since previous reports. Discussion points:
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| 27 Sep 2023 | Shopify’s developer happiness survey | Mark Côté (Shopify) | 00:44:21 | |
This week we’re joined by Mark Côté, who leads the Developer Infrastructure organization at Shopify, to learn about their developer survey program. Mark shares what went into designing and running the survey, what they’ve done to drive participation rates higher, and how they interpret their data. Mentions and links:
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| 10 Aug 2022 | Moving Slack's development experience to remote environments | Sylvestor George (Slack) | 00:37:21 | |
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. | |||
| 07 Jun 2023 | Platform teams vs enabling teams | Manuel Pais (Team Topologies) | 00:53:26 | |
Manuel Pais delves into one of the concepts covered in his book “Team Topologies”: platform and enabling work. Manuel shares how he views the strategy behind when and how to invest in platform or enabling work. This conversation also goes into each type of work in more detail, covering topics such as measuring cognitive load and where platform engineering may be heading in the future.
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| 13 Dec 2022 | Leading infrastructure change at scale | Ian White (DAT) | 00:50:12 | |
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 teams and business stakeholders to successfully drive change. — (01:00) - The challenges DAT was facing as Ian joined (05:13) - How Ian used customer interviews to understand problems (10:48) - The typical journey companies take as they scale their infrastructure as they grow (16:20) - How early changes were positioned and received (20:00) - The four personas Ian identified (25:14) - How Ian evangelized the vision (28:48) - Areas of pushback Ian foresees as they introduce new changes (33:00) - Handling teams that want to stay on self-managed infrastructure instead of moving to a managed infrastructure (41:55) - Managing business stakeholders (45:00) - Partnering with finance
Where to find Ian:
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