How to measure and improve developer productivity | Nicole Forsgren (Microsoft Research, GitHub, Google)

Starting with what is your problem or what is your goal, I would say this is a bigger challenge than most people recognize or realize. Eighty percent of the folks that I work with, this is their biggest problem, even at like executive levels. Teams will have gone off for several months and they're tackling something and they'll come back with uncertainty and they'll say, like, Well, you told me to improve developer experience. And I'm like, okay, what do you mean by this? Are you talking about inner and outer loop? Are you talking about friction? Are you talking about culture? But if you're talking about culture, this is totally different than if you're talking about friction in tool chains. If you're on different pages, you're heading in completely different directions. Mm-hm Welcome to Lenny's Podcast, where I interview world-class product leaders and growth experts to learn from their hard-won experiences building and growing today's most successful products. Today my guest is Nicole Forsgren.

This is actually my first recording back since going on Patly for the past couple months. And what an awesome episode to get back into the swing of things. Nicole is the developer productivity expert, having written the award winning book Excelate. And she's been the co author of the State of DevOps report year after year. She's currently a partner at Microsoft Research. Leading developer productivity, research and strategy.

And she's helped some of the biggest companies in the world move faster, improve product quality, and transform their cultures. In our conversation, we get into the weeds of how to go about measuring and improving your engineering team's productivity and experience. We talk about the door framework and the space framework. and how to actually implement them to understand how your engineering team is doing. Nicole also shares benchmarks for what elite companies are at.

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