Engineering Enablement by DX

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:Follow Ian on LinkedIn

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. Discussion points:Brian’s background and story at Meetup - [00:02:20]Brian’s perspective on Platform work, generally - [00:06:40]The conversation around dissolving the Platform group - [00:12:05]Advice for Platform groups positioning their teams - [00:16:55]Making sure Platform groups are focused on the right problems [00:21:21]How Platform groups can think about communicating with the business [00:23:50]Bringing engineering teams into the planning process - [00:25:43]Deciding to build vs buy in a down market - [00:28:40]How developer happiness is part of positioning platform work [00:32:30]Follow Brian: Brian's LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/bguthrie/Mentions and links: Brian's talk, Is the optimal size of a platform team... zero?The Future of Ops is Platform Engineering by Charity MajorsFormer Shopify CTO's take on the optimal spend on platform workResearch on how developer happiness impacts productivity 

Max Kanat-Alexander and Or Michael Berlowitz discuss gathering real-time and periodic feedback from developers. They cover listening channels, volume metrics, building surveys, handling results, and the real-time feedback tool. They share experiences, advice, and insights on implementing this approach for developer engagement.

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:Follow Mark on LinkedInRead blog posts written by members of Shopify's Developer Acceleration team

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. 

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. Resources mentioned: Customer Interview GuideCustomer Interview Questions

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. 

Jasmine James, Senior Engineering Manager at Twitter, discusses how her team manages support requests, prioritizes based on personas, and presents the ROI. They also explore optimizing workflows, driving developer experience at the VP level, and creating a customer-oriented mindset.

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.Watch the on-demand fireside chat or read the announcement of Nicole joining DX as a strategic advisor. 

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.