A better way to measure developer productivity
Why starting with developer experience is the key to measuring productivity and driving meaningful improvement
Despite decades of research and practical experience, measuring developer productivity remains an elusive problem. Leaders today face more pressure than ever to deliver results, yet struggle with finding useful signals to guide improvement.
Some organizations attempt to use metrics such as lead time or pull requests completed, which focus on the speed and output of their developers. These efforts, however, fail to capture the full story around productivity or drive actual improvements.
When we first introduced our original DevEx framework, our goal was to show that measuring developer productivity required starting from the developer experience. By capturing developers’ own perspectives and pairing them with data from engineering systems, we unlocked a new way to generate clear, actionable signals. Today, that early work forms the foundation of the Core 4, the industry standard for understanding and improving engineering effectiveness at scale.
If you are wrestling with how to measure or improve productivity, this paper is for you. It breaks down developer experience into its core components, giving you a clear way to understand and optimize each one. We share guidance on how to measure these components alongside overall engineering KPIs, helping you see the full impact of improvements.
This work is grounded in extensive research and years of practical experience helping hundreds of organizations improve developer productivity. The approach has been proven at scale in companies like Pfizer and eBay, where it has driven outcomes such as reducing lead times by 6x, doubling release frequency, and accelerating innovation.
As of 2025, these ideas are now the foundation of the Core 4, the industry standard for measuring and improving developer productivity.
Who is the DevEx framework specifically written for?
- You lead a developer enablement function focused on making developers’ lives better, and are looking for a proven framework to build off.
- You’re an executive at a large enterprise that is seeing slowing rates of innovation, and want to know how to turn things around.
- You’re a founder, CEO, or executive at a startup that is seeing software delivery speed decrease as headcount grows, and want a toolkit to address it.
- You’re having intense internal debates about what type of engineering metrics to track at your company, and are looking for a science-based approach.
For those interested in the origins of this work, you can read the full DevEx paper, which laid the groundwork for understanding developer experience as the key to unlocking productivity. If you want to see how this thinking has evolved into today’s practice, explore the Core 4 framework, now used by leading engineering organizations to systematically measure and improve productivity at scale.