Developer Experience as Leverage

I suspect that one of the most powerful points of leverage for any tech company - in a downturn or no - is excellent developer experience.

Great dev tooling makes it a joy to work on a codebase, increases the speed at which new hires can become effective, and increases retention. This means the company can execute faster and adapt more quickly, too.

That means we should think about objective metrics to measure DevEx by both impact and investment.

On impact we could think about how quickly (p50 & p90 times) a pull request lands on master, how long it takes a new dev to start landing commits (or # commits in first 30/90 days), and how quickly tickets get closed after being claimed.
On investment we could look at dollars and - more importantly - engineering time spent on developer experience as a proportion of engineers at the company (DevExSWE-years/SWE-year).
Finally, we could subjectively measure dev sentiment on experience (CSAT) to see if the work is being qualitatively felt.

Internal tools are not considered very “sexy” and few teams share how much they spend on them - indeed, a lot of the “DevEx” work I’ve seen actually reduces developer velocity by increasing the complexity of stacks. It would be powerful to have companies start correctly measuring and improving these kinds of velocity metrics!