Engineering Enablement by Abi Noda - podcast cover

Engineering Enablement by Abi Noda

This is a weekly podcast focused on developer productivity and the teams and leaders dedicated to improving it. Topics include in-depth interviews with Platform and DevEx teams, as well as the latest research and approaches on measuring developer productivity. The EE podcast is hosted by Abi Noda, the founder and CEO of DX (getdx.com) and published researcher focused on developing measurement methods to help organizations improve developer experience and productivity.

Episodes

The people side of engineering and an open conversation about Agile | Brent Strange (GoDaddy)

Brent Strange , Director of Engineering Excellence at GoDaddy, has a unique perspective on the role of an internal enablement team because he focuses more on the people and processes instead of tooling. Here he shares his perspective on org structure, as well as the role of agile coaches and his response to some of the negative views that exist towards Agile.

Aug 24, 202232 minEp. 15

Moving Slack's development experience to remote environments | Sylvestor George (Slack)

Sylvestor George (Staff Software Engineer on Slack’s Internal Tools Team) led a project to move the entire development experience to remote environments, which was widely regarded as a “dramatically better experience”. Here he shares the full story of that project, including how they identified the problem, the solution they created, and how they convinced engineers to adopt the new workflow.

Aug 10, 202237 minEp. 14

Snyk’s journey with developer experience and productivity | Crystal Hirschorn (Snyk)

In this episode Abi Noda is joined by Crystal Hirschorn, who leads Platform Infrastructure, SRE, and Developer Experience at Snyk. In their conversation, Crystal shares the story behind the recently founded Developer experience group, including why they named the team Developer Experience, how she calculates the cost of the problems they solve, and how they partner with engineering teams.

Aug 04, 202233 minEp. 13

Supporting 100,000 engineers | Max Pugliese (IBM)

Max Pugliese , formerly the Director of Developer Experience at IBM, offers a look at what it’s like to support tens of thousands of engineers. He explains why it’s important to think about the culture and processes surrounding the tooling changes a team tries to implement, how to stay close to developers, and more.

Jul 28, 202231 minEp. 12

The value of having a PM on a platform team | Jelmer Borst (Picnic Technologies)

In this episode Abi speaks with Jelmer Borst, Product Manager for Picnic Technologies’ Platform group. Jelmer explains what the value is of having a PM in an internal-facing team, and shares his process for gathering feedback from developers to understand where they’re experiencing friction.

Jul 13, 202234 minEp. 11

Staffing infrastructure teams | Will Larson (Calm, Stripe, Uber)

Will Larson, the CTO at Calm, covers a wide range of topics including whether Infrastructure Engineering is chronically understaffed, the role of Eng Ops, how his opinion on the “build vs buy” question has changed, his thoughts on metrics, and more. Helpful resources: Will's Infraeng book Will's article, Infrastructure planning Will's article, How to invest in infrastructure...

Jun 08, 202241 minEp. 6

Supporting autonomous teams | Victoria Morgan-Smith (Financial Times)

Joining us for this episode is Victoria Morgan-Smith , the Director of Delivery for Engineering Enablement at the Financial Times. Victoria shares some of the tradeoffs in having an autonomous, “you build it, you run it” culture. She also shares how her group equips engineering teams with metrics, best practices, and more. Follow Victoria on LinkedIn...

May 26, 202235 minEp. 5

What it looks like to hire Engineering Effectiveness too late | Peter Seibel (ex-Twitter)

In this episode Abi talks with Peter Seibel. Peter previously was the Director of Engineering for the Democratic National Committee, and before that led Twitter’s Engineering Effectiveness (EE) team. In this interview, Peter reflects on his experience at Twitter, sharing why it’s better to invest in EE early and his vision for how EE teams can fulfill their potential. Useful links: Follow Peter on Twitter and LinkedIn Read Peter's post about leading Engineering Effectiveness at Twitter: Let a 1,...

May 12, 202238 minEp. 4

Tactics for driving service adoption | Varun Achar (Razorpay)

In this episode, Varun Achar (Director of Engineering at Razorpay) explains how the Platform org has grown from a 15-person team owning everything, to 3 separate subteams. He also shares how they think about creating a culture of productivity, and some of the tactics they’ve used for increasing service adoption. Helpful links: Connect with Varun on LinkedIn Read Varun's blog post, The Platform Engineer...

May 04, 202237 minEp. 3

How GitHub’s developer experience team has evolved | Liz Saling (GitHub)

Liz Saling, Director of Engineering at GitHub, shares the story of how the Developer Experience group was founded and why GitHub paused features for a quarter to focus on making developer experience improvements. Helpful links: Watch Liz’s GitHub Universe talk, “ Paying Down Technical Debt ” Find Liz on LinkedIn or Twitter Read Liz’s blog at lizsaling.com Read GitHub’s engineering blog...

Apr 13, 202243 minEp. 1