Editorial
The Gist:
- Improving productivity matters. A positive developer experience enhances productivity and leads to higher-quality software, which benefits the entire organization.
- Empower developers fully. Allowing developers to focus on software creation without unnecessary distractions leads to innovation and job satisfaction.
- Attracting top talent. Investing in developer experience is crucial for attracting and retaining top-tier developers.
Do you want to shorten your time to market, enhance brand recognition, increase your revenue growth and improve customer satisfaction? Invest in a good developer experience in your organization.
Having top-tier developers in your organization can make or break your success, even if you’re not in IT — and especially if you’re in digital marketing. Having those developers as part of the marketing team instead of IT could be a winning move.
When we discuss tools like CMS, CRM, ERP, ecommerce platforms, martech, AI, cloud computing, DevOps, workflow management, automation, digital transformation, APIs, headless architecture and composable systems, we’re talking about software. And when we talk about software, there are many dimensions we can explore. We can speak about patterns, architectures, paradigms, platforms, programming languages, frameworks and tools — and developers are at the heart of it all.
These developers — including programmers, architects and engineers — are the ones who will bring technology to life and make it usable. Without good software developers, no software solution, no matter how good it is, will be fully effective and reliable.
The Importance of Developer Experience
Since software is ubiquitous in any enterprise, any company that wants to be successful must see itself as a software company. This is obvious for the digital-native enterprises; there wouldn't be Uber, Amazon or Airbnb without software. However, for non-digital-native organizations, this also holds true.
Although some companies see software as a tool or asset, they must acknowledge that their software is intertwined with their strategy as a company. Walmart couldn't be without its inventory systems, just as DHL or UPS rely on their tech to streamline global logistics. CNN, Fox or any other media giant couldn't broadcast its content without cutting-edge platforms. United, Delta or any other airline wouldn't function without the strength of their reservation system and apps.
A company’s mix of software services, tools and providers clearly reflects its strategy and plays a critical role in executing that strategy. This mix tends to be even more complex in the composable and microservices era.
Companies need unique HR efforts that focus only on developers because software developers are their own breed. Statistically, they have a unique professional diversity, and they tend to conglomerate around several personality types, to name a few. While companies have long understood the importance of employee experience, most of them have failed to realize that the parameters that work for the rest of the organization will not fit the bill for developers. They need something else: developer experience.
For most companies, developer experience is something new, and it's worth considering more widely in the organization's strategy. Attracting and retaining top-tier developers directly affects the quality of a company’s software (yes, your company makes software!) and, ultimately, its overall success. It’s about more than just productivity — delivering the final product faster and at a lower cost. The quality of the end product is directly tied to the caliber of its developers. As Joel Spolsky said 20 years ago, “Five Antonio Salieris won’t produce Mozart’s Requiem. Never.”
In digital marketing, projects often fail not due to the marketing itself but because of issues with the digital side, such as the software. This is often overlooked because most digital projects don’t fail completely; they just partially fail. However, these partial failures hurt companies. They waste time and money due to underused or poorly utilized platforms. Quite often, this happens because of the lack of specialized and motivated technical talent.
Related Article: Unleashing Marketing Creativity With Low-Code/No-Code Platforms
Autonomy Is Key to the Developer Experience
Developers are looking for something other than nice perks; they’re looking for growth opportunities. They tend to have a strong desire to prove and hone their craft. They look for challenges to put their expertise to work. Unfortunately, this is where many companies fail, as they hire software builders and make them spend a lot of their time doing something else.
Developers are, at their heart, problem solvers. They like to understand the problem and design and implement the solution. Good developers see their profession as a craft. They want to build something that they can feel proud of. To do so, they need empowerment and space to create solutions their way. Good developers will gravitate toward environments that allow them to do so.
Let Developers Develop
What good developers love is to build software. They understand that building good software requires being aligned with business needs and project stakeholders. What they hate is having their "development time" sucked away in meetings, stand-ups and ticket conversations.
When developers spend a significant percentage of their time doing something other than software building, they waste their capabilities on tasks that they don't like and that they’re not good at — and they hate it.
Software building is a skill that requires a lot of creativity, analysis and concentration. The biggest enemy of a developer is distractions. You might think you took just a minute of your engineer’s time, but in reality, it's twenty minutes or even an hour. Developers need sustained blocks of undivided attention. Empower them to have these large chunks of time available. Plan your meetings around these blocks of concentration, not the other way around.
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Enhancing Developer Experience With AI
Developers distaste repetitive, boring tasks, but they have to do them. AI can help automate these error-prone tasks, so it's important to leverage this technology. Let your developers come up with proposals on how AI can help them. Believe me, they’ve already done their research, and they might already have strong opinions and ideas. Give them leeway.
Let’s finish with Joel Spolsky again. He wanted to build the best software company. So he devised this sequence: "Best working conditions → Best developers → Best software → Profit." Now that your organization understands that it is a software organization, this should resonate with you. The better developer experience you provide, the more profit you will earn.
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