IMPROVING Developer Experience
Pinpoint what's slowing your teams down, benchmark against industry data, and develop with a customized action plan for improving developer productivity
PROBLEM
When developers spend their days fighting tooling, waiting on dependencies, and navigating unclear processes, they disengage. The best ones leave. The cost is not just attrition. It’s the institutional knowledge that walks out the door, and the months required to ramp up replacements. Firms that systematically reduce developer friction retain talent and ship faster.
Organizations with mature DevProd programs deploy code 30% more frequently with 20% fewer defects [source]
Engineers who are satisfied with their tools and workflows are 47% more productive [source]
SOLUTION
If you want to know what’s holding your engineers back, ask them. Surface the invisible friction that slows delivery and frustrates your best engineers. Analyze results across teams, locations, and organizational dimensions to find patterns. Create accountability for improvement with clear metrics and a structured, coherent action plan.
Survey your engineering organization across 25 drivers of developer productivity
Benchmark your performance against 120,000+ data samples across industries
Translate insights into a customized improvement plan ready for execution
OUR WORKSHOP
Our six-week program combines rigorous measurement with expert guidance to help engineering organizations understand and improve developer experience. We have partnered with DX, the creator of the Developer Experience Index (DXI), to survey your teams on 25 research-backed drivers of productivity and satisfaction.
The program begins with selecting the drivers most relevant to your organization and deploying the DXI survey via Slack, Microsoft Teams, or email.
Once results are in, our technical collaborators analyze patterns across teams, geographies, and organizational dimensions, benchmarking your performance against industry data. From this data, we produce a customized action plan that prioritizes your biggest opportunities and provides proven playbooks for addressing them. You leave not just with data but with a clear path forward.
Learning Objectives
Identify the specific drivers of developer experience creating the most friction in your organization
Understand how your engineering organization compares to industry benchmarks across key productivity dimensions
Analyze patterns in developer experience across teams, geographies, and organizational structures
Prioritize improvement opportunities based on impact and feasibility
Apply proven playbooks and practices for addressing common developer experience challenges
Develop a customized action plan with clear metrics for measuring progress
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This is a six-week program.
During weeks one through three, we work with you to select the drivers of developer experience most relevant to your organization and deploy the DXI survey via Slack, Microsoft Teams, or email. The survey itself takes developers only minutes to complete.
During weeks four through six, we analyze results with your leadership team and develop a customized action plan.
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Engineering leaders typically drive this initiative, but the program delivers value across the organization. Engineering managers, directors, and senior leaders gain visibility into team-level friction and opportunities.
Product leaders gain insight into what is slowing delivery and how well product and engineering are collaborating.
Individual contributors complete the survey and benefit from the resulting improvements.
We recommend executive sponsorship and involvement from senior engineering leaders.
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Participants leave with a complete set of deliverables ready for immediate use:
A Developer Experience Index snapshot revealing where your most significant opportunities for improvement are across your selected drivers (there are 25 to choose from) of productivity and satisfaction
Insights broken down by team, geographical location, tenure, and other organizational dimensions to identify patterns and outliers
Benchmark comparisons against 120,000+ data samples across industries and company sizes, showing where you lead and where you lag
A customized action plan prioritizing your biggest opportunities with proven playbooks and practices for addressing them
A simple method for ongoing measurement and continuous improvement
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The Developer Experience Index is a survey platform created by DX, a company founded by leading researchers in developer productivity, including contributors to DORA and the SPACE framework.
The DXI measures 25 research-backed drivers of developer experience, from code review speed and documentation quality to deployment friction and technical debt. Nerd/Noir partners with DX to deploy the survey and translate results into action through our consulting expertise.
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DORA metrics measure delivery outcomes like deployment frequency and lead time. They tell you how fast you are shipping but not why you are shipping at that speed.
The DXI captures the qualitative factors that drive those outcomes: the friction developers experience, the tools that help or hinder them, and the organizational dynamics that affect their work.
Used together, DORA and DXI provide a complete picture of engineering performance.
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Great! You’re ahead of the game.
If your organization already runs DXI surveys, we can skip the survey deployment phase and move directly into analysis and action planning.
We add significant value beyond the survey by helping you interpret results, identify patterns across organizational dimensions, and develop a customized action plan using proven playbooks.
Many organizations collect developer experience data but struggle to translate it into meaningful improvement initiatives. That’s where we come in.
FREQUENTLY ASKED QUESTIONS
DOWNLOAD OUR FREE GUIDE
Recommendations and practices for measuring developer productivity and experience in a way that promotes engagement and an outcome-first culture.
We cover our approaches, including how we leverage DX’s Developer Experience Index survey to measure progress while fostering a culture of transparency and continuous improvement.
