How to measure and improve developer productivity | Nicole Forsgren (Microsoft Research, Github)

... starting with what is your problem or what is your goal? I would say this is a bigger challenge than most people recognize or realize. 80% of the folks that I work with, this is their biggest problem, even at, like, executive levels. Teams will have gone off for several months and they're tackling something and they'll come back with uncertainty. And they'll say, like, "Well, you told me to improve developer experience." And I'm like, "Okay, what do you mean by this? Are you talking about inner and outer loop? Are you talking about friction? Are you talking about culture?" But if you're talking about culture, this is totally different than if you're talking about friction in tool chains. If you're on different pages, you're heading in completely different directions.

(intro music plays) Welcome to Lenny's Podcast, where I interview world-class product leaders and growth experts to learn from their hard-won experiences building and growing today's most successful products. Today my guest is Nicole Forsgren. This is actually my first recording back since going on pat leave for the past couple of months, and what an awesome episode to get back into the swing of things. Nicole is the developer productivity expert, having written the award-winning book Accelerate, and she's been the co-author of the State of DevOps Report year after year. She's currently a partner at Microsoft Research, leading developer productivity, research, and strategy, and she's helped some of the biggest companies in the world move faster, improve product quality, and transform their cultures. In our conversation, we get into the weeds of how to go about measuring and improving your engineering team's productivity and experience. We talk about the DORA framework and the SPACE framework and how to actually implement them to understand how your engineering team is doing. Nicole also shares benchmarks for what elite companies are at. We talk about why moving faster turns out to be one of the best ways to improve quality and stability, plus pitfalls you want to avoid, and also a preview of a new book that she's working on and so much more. Enjoy this episode with Nicole Forsgren after a short word from our sponsors. Today's entire episode is brought to you by DX, a platform for measuring and improving developer productivity. DX is designed by the researchers behind frameworks such as DORA, SPACE, and DevEx, including Nicole Forsgren, who is my guest for this very episode. If you've tried measuring developer productivity, you know that there are a lot of basic metrics out there and a lot of ways to do this wrong, and getting that full view of productivity is still really hard. DX tackles this problem by combining qualitative and quantitative insights based on the very research Nicole and her team have done, giving you full clarity into how your developers are doing. DX is used by both startups and Fortune 500 companies, including companies like Twilio, Amplitude, eBay, Brex, Toast, Pfizer, and Procter & Gamble. To learn more about DX and get a demo of their product, visit their website at getdx.com/lenny. That's getdx.com/lenny. Nicole, welcome to the podcast.