Engineering Culture

Turning Developer Experience Into a Company-Wide Metric

Turned DevEx from an engineering-internal concern into a company-wide north star metric, moving a mid-sized SaaS org to the 75th percentile for developer experience in its cohort.

75th percentile benchmark reachedDXI adopted as north starQuarterly org-wide reporting

The Challenge

In an engineering-powered B2B/B2C SaaS business, developer experience was treated as a nice-to-have: something engineers cared about, but not something the business tracked or invested in deliberately. The cost of poor DevEx was real (slower delivery, more incidents, higher attrition risk) but invisible to everyone outside engineering. Changing that required more than tooling. It required a shift in how the whole business thought about engineering productivity.

The Approach

I introduced the Developer Experience Index (DXI), a compound metric combining qualitative survey data with quantitative signals, as the formal measure of engineering health. We established a baseline, benchmarked against comparable organisations, and made DXI a standing agenda item at the leadership level. Alongside measurement, we invested in the underlying drivers: internal platforms, documentation, shared capabilities, and clear ownership models. Crucially, every initiative was framed in terms of business impact, not engineering comfort.

The Outcome

The organisation moved from an untracked baseline to the 75th percentile for companies of similar size and type. More importantly, DevEx stopped being an engineering conversation and became a business conversation. It is now tracked quarterly alongside product and commercial metrics, representing a lasting change in how the company values and invests in its engineering capability.

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This kind of work usually runs as developer experience product leadership.

Companies I've worked with

revoBill Jimdo GitLab Revolut Hermes Germany MossGlocal

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