How to measure AI developer productivity in 2025 | Nicole Forsgren

A lot of companies are trying to measure productivity for their teams.

Most productivity metrics are a lie. If the goal is more lines of code, I can prompt something to write the longest piece of code ever. It's just too easy to game that system.

How do I know if my eng team is moving fast enough, if they can move faster, if they're just not performing as well as they can?

Most teams can move faster, but faster for what? We can ship trash faster every single day. We need strategy and really smart decisions to know what to ship.

One of the biggest issues we're gonna probably have with AI is learning how much to trust code that it generates.

We can't just put in a command and get something back and accept it. We really need to evaluate it, you know, are we seeing hallucinations? What's the reliability? Does it meet the style that we would typically write?

So much of the time is now gonna be spent reviewing code versus writing code.

There's some real opportunity there to not just rethink workflows, but rethink how we structure our days and how we structure our work. Now, we can also make a 45-minute work block useful, because getting into the flow is actually kind of handed off, at least i- in part to the machine, or the machine can help us get back into the flow by reminding us of context and generating diagrams of the system.

What's just, like, one thing that you think an eng team, a product team can do this week, next week to get more done?

Honestly, I think the best thing you can do...

Today, my guest is Nicole Forsgren. With so much talk about how AI is increasing developer productivity, more and more people are asking, "How do we measure this productivity gain, and are these AI tools actually helping us or hurting how our developers work?" Nicole has been at the forefront of this space longer than anyone. She created the most used frameworks for measuring developer experience, called DORA and SPACE. She wrote the most important book in the space called Accelerate, and is about to publish her newest book called Friction Less, which gives you a guide to helping your team move faster and do more in this emerging AI world. Her core thesis is that AI indeed accelerates coding, but developers aren't speeding up as much as you think, because they still have to deal with broken builds and unreliable tools and processes, and a bunch of new bottlenecks that are emerging. In our conversation, we chat about her current best and very specific advice for how to measure productivity gains from AI, signs that your team could be moving faster, what companies get wrong when trying to measure engineering productivity, how AI tools are both helping and hurting engineers, including getting into flow states, her seven-step process for setting up a developer experience team at your company, how to get buy-in and measure the impact of a team like this, and a ton more. This episode is for anyone looking to improve the performance of their engineering teams. If you enjoy this podcast, don't forget to subscribe and follow it in your favorite podcasting app or YouTube. It helps tremendously. Also, if you become an annual subscriber of my newsletter, you get a year free of 15 incredible products, including Lovable, Replit, Bolt, Indata and Linear, Superhuman, Descript, Whisperflow, Gamma, Perplexity, Warp, Granola, Magic Patterns, Raycast, ChatBRD, and Mobit. Head on over to lennysnewsletter.com and click Product Pass. With that, I bring you Nicole Forsgren. This episode is brought to you by Mercury. I've been banking with Mercury for years, and honestly, I can't imagine banking any other way at this point. I switched from Chase and holy moly, what a difference. Sending wires, tracking spend, giving people on my team access to move money around, so freaking easy. Where most traditional banking websites and apps are clunky and hard to use, Mercury is meticulously designed to be an intuitive and simple experience. And Mercury brings all the ways that you use money into a single product, including credit cards, invoicing, bill pay, reimbursements for your teammates, and capital. Whether you're a funded tech startup looking for ways to pay contractors and earn yield on your idle cash, or an agency that needs to invoice customers and keep them current, or an e-commerce brand that needs to stay on top of cash flow and access capital, Mercury can be tailored to help your business perform at its highest level. See what over 200,000 entrepreneurs love about Mercury. Visit mercury.com to apply online in 10 minutes. Mercury is a fintech, not a bank. Banking services provided through Mercury's FDIC-insured partner banks. For more details, check out the show notes. Here's a puzzle for you. What do OpenAI, Cursor, Perplexity, Vercel, Plat, and hundreds of other winning companies have in common? The answer is they're all powered by today's sponsor, WorkOS. If you're building software for enterprises, you've probably felt the pain of integrating single sign-on, SCIM, RBAC, audit logs, and other features required by big customers. WorkOS turns those deal blockers into drop-in APIs with a modern developer platform built specifically for B2B SaaS. Whether you're a seed stage startup trying to land your first enterprise customer or a unicorn expanding globally, WorkOS is the fastest path to becoming enterprise ready and unlocking growth. They're essentially Stripe for enterprise features. Visit workos.com to get started or just hit up their Slack support where they have real engineers in there who answer your questions super fast. WorkOS allows you to build like the best with delightful APIs, comprehensive docs, and a smooth developer experience. Go to workos.com to make your app enterprise ready today. Nicole, thank you so much for being here and welcome to the podcast.