Expanding productivity measurement across the product development lifecycle (PDLC)

New measures help organizations identify friction and improve productivity across product management and design.

Kali Watkins

Product Marketing

The lines between engineering, product, and design are blurring, while bottlenecks and opportunities for improvement are increasingly shifting beyond coding. At the same time, organizations are rolling out AI tools to product managers and designers and want to understand their impact.

DX is introducing a new way to measure productivity across product management and product design: New Snapshot questions to help organizations identify friction, understand its impact, and improve how product teams build and deliver software.

This is the first step in a broader effort to measure the product development lifecycle (PDLC). Over time, DX will bring together experience data, system data, and shared measures of effectiveness and delivery to help organizations understand and improve how products get built.

Here’s a look at what’s new, how the questions were developed, and how organizations can get started.

Identify friction across product and design

Organizations can identify friction in areas like priority stability, customer access, design system effectiveness, and collaboration with engineering, then use workflow measures to understand its impact.

The new questions cover key areas of productivity and experience for product managers and designers, including:

Requirements and design rework: How often requirements need rework and how much design effort is spent redoing work.
Customer interaction: How frequently PMs and designers engage directly with customers and end users.
Implementation fidelity: What percentage of designs are implemented as intended.
Meetings and interruptions: Time spent in meetings, frequency of interruptions, and opportunities for focused work.

The new measures also capture AI adoption and impact, including how much time PMs and designers save using AI, how often AI is used to create product artifacts, and how designers use AI to refine their work. Together, these measures help organizations understand where teams experience friction, how much it affects their work, and where to focus improvements.

Developed and tested through research

Building on DX’s research into developer productivity and experience, the new measures were developed with input from internal and external product managers and designers to identify the factors that affect their productivity. The questions went through many rounds of review and interviews to ensure they were clear and easy to answer. Initial responses were analyzed to test whether the results could provide meaningful insights that organizations can act on. Measuring the PDLC is a current and ongoing area of research; expect to see more from our research team soon.

Measure engineering, product, and design together

As part of this launch, we’re introducing a new branching experience that allows organizations to survey developers, product managers, and designers in a single Snapshot, with questions tailored to each role. Participants receive role-specific questions, and organizations can view results across all three disciplines or focus on each one individually.