How do I get leaders to care about developer productivity initiatives?
DX works with over 300+ organizations to help them drive initiatives to improve developer productivity. These initiatives—often led by centralized teams—share the common goal of increasing ROI per engineer.
Yet, many leaders looking to spearhead similar efforts come to us asking for help solving a critical challenge: how to get leadership to prioritize and invest in developer productivity.
This guide provides some tips and recommendations based on our practical experience. By framing and communicating developer productivity in the right ways, leaders can achieve buy-in from stakeholders and secure the investment needed to drive results.
Make developer productivity initiatives about them
Every leader has priorities, pressures, and pain points. So one key to getting their attention is to frame your initiatives as a solution to their most pressing personal concerns.
- What is keeping your CEO up at night? Are they worried about the scalability of your engineering org? Launching products on time and within budget? Are they focused on improving margins?
- What would help that VP keep their job or get a bigger bonus? Are they under pressure to deliver more features faster or streamline inefficiencies in the engineering process?
Once you identify these priorities, draw a clear connection between your developer productivity initiatives and their goals. For example, show how reducing bottlenecks in the pipeline can accelerate time to market, or how addressing developer toil can lead to few missed deadlines.
When leaders can clearly see how your initiatives help their own personal success, you’ll turn them into enthusiastic supporters and advocates of your work.
Make it about dollars
When it comes to leadership buy-in, metrics like lead time or developer satisfaction don’t often resonate. Business leaders want initiatives aligned to dollars or profit and loss. Therefore, your goal should be to clearly convey how developer productivity maps to the bottom line.
Here are ways to translate developer productivity into dollars:
- Developer time savings: For example, if reducing build wall times by 20% saves 500 engineering hours per month, this can be converted into a dollar amount.
- Time to market: Highlight how faster delivery or fewer bugs directly supports business goals like hitting revenue targets or closing key deals.
- Incident reduction: Position your initiatives as a way to improve reliability and reduce downtime. For most organizations, the cost of incidents is significant in terms of both direct revenue and internal disruption.
At DX, we’ve designed various measurements and tools that help leaders speak in terms of dollars. For example, the Developer Experience Index (DXI) is a predictive measure of developer experience that directly correlates to developer time savings.
Make it a competition
No CXO wants to lag behind their closest competitors, and no VP wants to perform worse than their peers. Benchmarks are a powerful way to capture attention and spark action.
- Leverage external comparisons: Share industry benchmarks that highlight where your organization stands in comparison to others. For example, “our competitors are shipping 50% faster than us. We need to address this or we will fall behind…”
- Show internal comparisons: If your teams are distributed across regions or business units, highlight internal performance differences. “Org A’s cycle time is 30% shorter than Org B’s. What would it take to replicate their success across the organization?”
Competition taps into leadership’s natural drive to win, whether against competitors or other parts of the organization. Use it to your advantage.
Securing leadership buy-in for developer productivity isn’t about selling the initiative itself – it’s about aligning your goals with theirs. By framing your case in terms of leadership’s priorities, dollars, and competition, you can fuel buy-in that turns your developer experience initiatives into an organization priority.