Hangar DX Podcast How Honeycomb Is 2Xing Its Engineers with AI
“Our internal target is to 2X our impact with AI over one year. Unlike some more outlandish mandates, that one is both aspirational and achievable,” says Emily Nakashima, SVP of Engineering at Honeycomb.
In this episode of The Hangar DX podcast, Emily shares how Honeycomb approached AI adoption at scale and why they try not to focus on metrics that can be gamed but rely more on self-reporting by developers.
Emily also discusses:
- Why flattening org charts is a short-term optimization that will cost companies later
- How Honeycomb issued a company-wide 2X mandate and what actually happened when they did
- Why the "buffet phase" of AI tool adoption is over and what a structured rollout looks like
- Why self-reporting beats hard metrics when measuring AI's impact on your team
- Why observability is more critical than ever in a world of non-deterministic AI-generated code
- Why AI SRE tools demo well but often fall short, and what they need to actually work
00:00 Introduction to Developer Experience and AI
02:19 Emily's Journey in Engineering and Leadership
05:15 Navigating Career Growth in Engineering
06:28 Cultural Shifts in Engineering Management
09:50 The Evolving Role of Engineering Managers
12:59 Upskilling in the Age of AI
17:50 AI Strategy and Product Development at Honeycomb
21:38 Measuring AI Impact and Productivity
28:09 The Future of Observability and AI in Engineering
About Emily Nakashima
Emily serves as SVP of Engineering at Honeycomb. A former manager and engineering leader at multiple developer tools companies, including Bugsnag and GitHub, Emily is passionate about building best-in-class, consumer-quality tools for engineers. She has a background in product engineering, performance optimization, client-side monitoring, and design.
About Hangar DX (dx.community)
The Hangar is a community of senior DevOps and senior software engineers focused on developer experience. This is a space where vetted, experienced professionals can exchange ideas, share hard-earned wisdom, troubleshoot issues, and ultimately help each other in their projects and careers.