Developer Experience and Platform Engineering

Developer Experience and Platform Engineering

🗣️I have seen discussions about having Developer Experience teams and some companies have used these words in some of their teams or departments/domains name. Maybe not the most important thing, but usually team names give some indication of team purpose.

I don’t see having Developer Experience teams as a worthy purpose. Is the end purpose to have happy developers or to ship a great product? I think we can all agree it is the second.

While I believe it is important to make sure developers are as effective 💪 as they can be, I don’t think it should be the main purpose of any team. I see Developer Experience as part of something bigger, namely Platform Engineering. All big words, but how do they fit together?

🎉 Platform Engineering is about having platforms built by platform teams. These platforms have a specific purpose and they are used by many other teams. Platforms done right means that they empower their users to fulfill their needs with the platform in an effective and independent way (without being dependent on any manual action from the platform team). In order to achieve this, the developer experience with the platform has to be top-notch (among other things). In this perspective, great Developer Experience is a requirement of any great platform, and not a mission on its own.

❓What is your take on it?

Originally posted on LinkedIn.