I can't understate how much of a delight it is to actually be in person. To get started, why don't you share a brief intro, tell us a bit about you, and why this topic of developer effectiveness is important to you and to Spotify. Thanks so much for joining us at ParadigmShift. I'm your host, Kimberly Boyd, and I'm here with Austin Lamon, Head of Backstage at Spotify. Our guest today took to the stage to share how his organization created the right mechanisms for developer effectiveness. To succeed, we need to create an environment where our development teams can thrive. In a roomful of enterprises from various industries, a common theme has emerged. Today's episode is brought to you live from New York at our executive conference, ParadigmShift. Kimberly Boyd: Welcome to Pragmatism in Practice, a podcast from Thoughtworks, where we share stories of practical approaches to becoming a modern digital business. Once you're measuring them, it makes it a lot easier for organizations or teams, or individuals to feel empowered to test ways to move them. Start by just asking people how they're doing, and then, two, start putting metrics on those things that are the biggest problems. It's all about, 'Are developers happy' and broadly, 'What's helpful?' That's where satisfaction comes in.įocusing on developer satisfaction enabled Spotify as an organization to retain top people. The technologies developers depend on are constantly changing and evolving, so if we look at one lagging metric, it's all about satisfaction. Fast forward, the tool is enabling engineers to do their job day in and day out, but also creating these reusable patterns and these sets of tools and really almost codified culture that allows teams to build products. What developers want to be doing is building products.īackstage was born out of the need to onboard effectively as Spotify was quickly growing. The rest of their time is troubleshooting incidents, sitting in meetings, interviewing, dealing with security issues, and other areas that may be seen as a burden. This episode is presented to you from our executive conference ParadigmShift – learn more.ĭevelopers are spending 30%-40% of their time actually writing code.

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