Engineering Enablement by DX

Jean-Michel Lemieux, former CTO of Shopify and VP of Engineering at Atlassian, explains how to advocate for investing in platform work, which projects to fund, and what distinguishes a great platform leader. 

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Discussion points:

(1:38) Jean-Michel’s definition of platform work 

(6:44) Why reliability, performance, and stability do fall within platform work 

(7:24) The consequences of lacking a product mindset in platform

(9:20) Why and how to advocate for investing 50% of R&D spend in platform work 

(12:31) How Jean-Michel arrived at 50% as the percentage of R&D spend that should be allocated to platform 

(16:09) Jean-Michel’s experiences with different levels of investment in platform work 

(21:59) What percentage of platform investment should go towards keep the lights on work

(24:01) Whether the allocation changes at different company stages

(27:05) Why platform work is consistently underinvested in

(29:00) Why having a platform team could be an anti-pattern

(32:32) How to advocate for this work to leaders

(35:35) What it looks like to over-invest in platform work 

(40:03) How to decide which initiatives to invest in

(47:41) Making build vs buy decisions in platform work 

(49:58) What distinguishes a great platform leader 

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Mentions and links:
Follow Jean-Michel Lemieux on LinkedIn and Twitter
Abi’s post that sourced many of the questions discussed in this conversation
Jean-Michel’s book chapter on platform investments
Jean-Michel’s definition of what platform work is
The podcast episode on what Shopify expects of managers 

Jonathan Biddle, Director of Engineering Effectiveness at Wayfair, shares the story of how his team found repeat success and subsequently grew in size and scope. He shares lessons they’ve borrowed from startups, including understanding the adoption curve and knowing your core users, and offers advice for other platform teams looking to move to the next stage.

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Discussion points:

(01:15) How Jonathan moved into his role

(05:30) Why Platforms teams are in a position of leverage, but also ambiguity

(07:18) The initial work Jonathan’s team focused on

(10:07) Creating transactional versus recurring value

(11:36) The difference between startups and platform teams 

(14:12) Expanding the team’s scope and rebranding to Developer Acceleration

(18:20) What drove the platform team’s success

(21:05) Three adoption concepts to understand

(24:41) Knowing your core customers

(27:36) Adoption metrics and feedback gathering mechanisms

(33:37) When to mandate adoption or rely on organic adoption

(38:38) A story of when adoption fell short
(45:35) Advice for how other teams can go from zero to one

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Mentions and links:
Follow Jonathan on LinkedIn
Diffusion of Innovations by Everett M. Rogers (and the Wikipedia page for the book)
Crossing the Chasm by Geoffrey A. Moore
Let My People Go Surfing by Yvon Chouinard of Patagonia

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.

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(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 

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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 Majors
• Former Shopify CTO's take on the optimal spend on platform work
• Research on how developer happiness impacts productivity 

Max Kanat-Alexander and Or Michael Berlowitz (Berlo), share how they gather both periodic and real-time feedback from developers.

Discussion points:

• Overview of the listening channels used by Max and Berlo’s team - [00:00:58]
• Origin story of the Developer Engagement and Insights team - [00:02:49]
• Perspectives on volume metrics - [00:05:00]
• How the periodic surveys work - [00:08:51]
• Investment required to build the periodic surveys and real-time feedback - [00:14:20]
• How results are handled - [00:15:28]
• How the real-time feedback tool works - [00:21:40]
• Where the idea for the real-time feedback tool came from - [00:25:15]
• Building an MVP for the real-time feedback tool - [00:028:58]
• Other stakeholders involved in triaging feedback - [00:35:40]
• The experience developers have when encountering the real-time feedback tool - [00:37:34]
• How feedback collected via surveys differs from that of the real-time feedback tool - [00:40:44]
• Advice for other teams considering implementing this approach - [00:41:46]

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.

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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

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Mentions and links:

• Follow Mark on LinkedIn
• Read 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 Guide
• Customer 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. 

Twitter’s Developer Experience team is more mature than most. Here, Jasmine James, a Senior Engineering Manager - Developer Experience, explains how her team manages support requests, why they consider personas as part of their prioritization, and how they present the ROI of the team’s work.