Placing your bets: Developer experience strategy

Why developer experience strategy is more critical than ever

In today’s rapidly changing technological landscape, developers play a crucial role in driving innovation and growth while building the technology that powers the business. Companies that invested more heavily in engineering teams and infrastructure reported better outcomes. Specifically, companies that spent more than 10% of their engineering time on developer productivity had 2.3 times higher revenue growth rates than companies that spent less than 10% of their engineering time on developer productivity.¹ Organizations that attract and retain top engineering talent were more likely to outperform their peers in terms of revenue growth, market share, and profitability.²

Accelerating developer experience (DevEx) has become more pivotal than ever, but many companies are still working on a concrete strategy to start or focus their investments. In this article, we explore a framework of mutually reinforcing capabilities that an organization can use as a “gameboard” in thinking through their DevEx investments.

Standardizing capabilities to turbocharge the experience of developer teams

In our last article, “Defining a North Star for your developer experience,” we introduced a set of developer archetypes that characterize an organization’s developer experience strategy. Each developer archetype has a distinct vision and execution strategy, and—as a result—requires a unique mix of capabilities across talent, technology, and ways of working. In this article, we dive deeper into the specific set of capabilities organizations may choose to focus on in each archetype. First introduced in our Tech Trends 2024 series, our DevEx Capabilities framework represents a set of mutually reinforcing capabilities that companies can weave together to accelerate developer impact.³

The 3-part framework for developer experience capabilities

All archetypes rely on categories of capabilities: platforms and tools, culture and talent, and ways of working; however, they prioritize and sequence specific capabilities in different ways, depending on their strategic objectives.⁴

Endnotes

¹Stripe, “The developer coefficient,” September 2018.
²Rob Goffee and Gareth Jones, “Creating the best workplace on Earth,” Harvard Business Review, May 2013.
³Mike Bechtel and Bill Briggs (eds.), Tech Trends 2024, Deloitte Insights, 2024.
⁴Ibid.