Baking Developer Experience Into Your Culture

for Heavybit's DevGuild conference, July 27 2016

When building for developers, many of us start by scratching our own itches. That's great for pulling together an MVP — and doing some interesting engineering along the way — but it's all too easy to get wrapped up in the functionality of the thing and lose sight of what it's like to be on the other side of your API.

To prevent your shiny new tool from being reduced to just a set of inputs and outputs, we explore best practices worth baking into your team's culture — and how to carry those principles through growth and change.

Transcript

1. BAKING DX INTO YOUR CULTURE HEAVYBIT DEVGUILD @CYEN
5. SURFACE AREA TINY INTIMACY INFINITE FEEDBACK LOOP SHORT-CIRCUITED
6. EARLY GROWTH INTERNAL EXTERNAL
7. EARLY GROWTH INTERNAL EXTERNAL SURFACE AREA SMALL INTIMACY HIGH FEEDBACK LOOP SHORT
8. EARLY STAGE + INTERNAL DOGFOODING ▸ Integrate as tightly as possible into essential processes ▸ Goal: be intimately familiar with the pain points + problem being solved ▸ Don’t forget docs: docs should be reviewed along with code
9. EARLY GROWTH INTERNAL EXTERNAL SURFACE AREA SMALL INTIMACY MEDIUM FEEDBACK LOOP LONG
10. EARLY STAGE + EXTERNAL SUPPORT ▸ … is everybody’s problem. Keep as much of your team on the front lines ▸ Goal: complement dogfooding, outside perspective corroborates/contradicts ▸ Feeds back into documentation DAY O’ SUPPORT
11. EARLY GROWTH INTERNAL EXTERNAL SURFACE AREA SMALL INTIMACY HIGH FEEDBACK LOOP SHORT SURFACE AREA SMALL INTIMACY MEDIUM FEEDBACK LOOP LONG
12. EARLY GROWTH INTERNAL EXTERNAL SUFACE AREA LARGE INTIMACY MEDIUM FEEDBACK LOOP MEDIUM
13. GROWTH STAGE + INTERNAL ENCOURAGE EXPERIMENTS ▸ Specialization reduces efficacy of dogfooding ▸ Starter Projects: orient with respect to your developers ▸ Hackathons: permission to step out of day- to-day roles
14. EARLY GROWTH INTERNAL EXTERNAL SURFACE AREA LARGE INTIMACY LOW FEEDBACK LOOP LONG
15. GROWTH STAGE + EXTERNAL GET SOME FACE TIME ▸ Everybody should have a chance to be a user, talk to users ▸ Growth brings more opportunities to reach developers ▸ Events: remove the wall (literally!) between your team and developers
16. EARLY GROWTH INTERNAL EXTERNAL WHAT ABOUT ADVOCATES + EVANGELISTS? SURFACE AREA SMALL INTIMACY HIGH FEEDBACK LOOP SHORT SURFACE AREA SMALL INTIMACY MEDIUM FEEDBACK LOOP LONG SURFACE AREA LARGE INTIMACY MEDIUM FEEDBACK LOOP MEDIUM SURFACE AREA LARGE INTIMACY LOW FEEDBACK LOOP LONG
17. @CYEN THANKS CHRISTINE@HONEYCOMB.IO