Defining a North Star for your developer experience

Customer expectations are reaching new peaks: security, reliability, privacy, and seamless experiences have now become table stakes. One in five consumers would switch to a competitor after just one negative product experience.⁶ Developers—with the products they build often being the most prominent interaction between companies and their customers—find themselves in the hot seat for building differentiated, delightful, and trustworthy experiences. DevEx leaders must determine how best to enable developers to accelerate innovation and productivity while balancing security, quality, reliability, and cost concerns.

New development tools, frameworks, and playbooks are emerging at a rapid pace. In 2022, there were 200 million active code repositories on GitHub.⁷ More recently, Gen AI-enabled coding assistants (e.g., GitHub Copilot, Amazon CodeWhisperer) have gained popularity. While these tools are meant to decrease time to market and lower the cost of development, they also add another layer of complexity; developers are now confronted with the paradox of choice. Many developers find themselves working within a convoluted environment of tools with more than 250 software-as-a-service products,⁸ often with limited cross-platform integration and little guidance from leaders on the “preferred way” (sometimes called a “golden path” or a “well-lit path”). DevEx leaders acknowledge the need to streamline the developer tooling environment but may struggle with where to start given the sheer number of tools to evaluate and the delicate balance between short-term and long-term needs.

The proliferation of low-code/no-code platforms, such as Appian and OutSystems, has lowered the barriers to software development, enabling business users and non-developers to build applications. By 2025, an estimated 70% of new applications developed within enterprises will use low-code or no-code technologies, compared to only 25% in 2020.⁹ This “citizen developer” movement brings new opportunities, such as enabling faster innovation by decentralizing software development across the business. However, it can also pose potential risks around governance, security, and tech debt accumulation. To harness the potential of citizen developers while mitigating risks, DevEx leaders need to provide the right guardrails, platforms, and enabling capabilities.

Start by defining the foundational purpose for your DevEx organization. Create a pithy, aspirational vision statement that can serve as a rallying cry, galvanizing DevEx teams while simultaneously articulating value to stakeholders across the organization, all the way up to the C-suite. This statement should be simple, memorable, and enduring enough to be “evergreen” for the next three to five years. It should also lead with impact. For example, one e-commerce company embarked on a multi-year DevEx initiative in 2020 with a goal to bring elements of the company’s overall mission of humanizing e-commerce to its developer population.¹⁰

The role of a DevEx team articulates what company objectives your team will help the organization achieve. There is no one-size-fits-all role that every DevEx organization plays to enable developers and drive business value. Some DevEx teams choose to focus on improving developer productivity and efficiency by streamlining processes, communication, and cross-functional collaboration. Other teams aim to be a strategic adviser to the business, helping product leaders sense market signals and major shifts—such as Gen AI—and driving product decisions.

The e-commerce company’s DevEx team played the role of an internal advocate for human-centered developer experience. They offered engineering leaders and product managers a fact-based understanding of their developer pain points via surveys and interviews. They also took the lead in working cross-functionally to prioritize and secure support for DevEx initiatives that optimized efficiency, reduced burnout, and improved satisfaction.¹¹

To help DevEx leaders think about the unique role of their own developer organizations, we have developed four conceptual archetypes based on our research and experience. The role that a DevEx organization chooses to play is usually a mix of one or more archetypes. We dive deeper into the four common archetypes and implications in the full report.

It’s important to denote the tangible capabilities that will enable DevEx initiatives to accomplish the aspiration statement and role. Think of this as the “reason to believe” the DevEx teams will be successful. The e-commerce company focused its capabilities on enabling self-service through documentation, scaling forums for peer support, optimizing continuous integration/continuous delivery pipelines, and creating personalized development environments. Crystallizing the top focus areas helped the company’s DevEx team achieve maximum impact given time and investment constraints.¹²

Driving successful outcomes as the DevEx organization is highly dependent on how well it interacts with and influences stakeholders outside the DevEx team. These stakeholders include, but are not limited to, engineering and product leaders of specific product lines, customer experience and customer success, finance, legal, and even the C-suite. Aligning with these stakeholders on the focus of DevEx initiatives (e.g., knowledge playbooks versus in-flow development accelerators), the level of customization DevEx solutions provide, and the shared metrics to drive is essential for realizing DevEx impact.

The e-commerce company, which had dedicated a meaningful 20% of its engineering capacity toward DevEx investments, adopted a holistic, coordinated effort to scale across people, process, and technology since it recognized that “scaling one without the others would result in waste.” Moreover, it continuously gathered C-suite and cross-functional support by demonstrating the direct connection between improved developer experience and tangible impact to the overall business, such as reduced engineering time and costs.¹³