Using DX as a Director of Engineering at Adyen
Kali Watkins
Product Marketing
One of the biggest challenges with traditional developer productivity metrics is that they’re primarily used by senior leadership for reporting, but rarely by the teams where real improvements actually happen. When metrics live in executive dashboards instead of team workflows, organizations miss the opportunity for bottom-up improvement driven by the people closest to the work.
This creates a fundamental gap: leadership gets visibility into productivity challenges, but the teams experiencing those challenges don’t have the same data to identify and address their own pain points. Real productivity gains come when teams across a company can see what’s impacting them and take ownership of improvements.
This is where DX takes a fundamentally different approach. Rather than being another product that’s only useful at the leadership level, DX is designed to be transparent and useful for leaders at all levels—from individual contributors to directors to CTOs. Teams don’t just generate data for others to consume; they actively use it to drive their own improvements.
A director’s perspective
To illustrate this in practice, we recently interviewed Tamara Sequeiros, a Director of Engineering who leads five teams at Adyen. During our conversation, she shared her experience transitioning to data-driven decision-making with DX.
Her story highlights several key insights about how DX works differently:
Transparency drives engagement: Unlike traditional top-down metrics, DX’s transparent approach energized her teams. “All the engineers in my team are completely excited about it. It’s not just quantitative, but qualitative; they finally have a place to voice their opinion in a structured way,” she noted, with participation rates being "super high.”
Creating better alignment with Product: One of the most impactful changes wasn’t just within Tamara’s teams. “The transparency that DX provides is great, actually not only for engineers,” Tamara explained. "I was talking to my product counterpart, and I was amazed at how we actually can talk about this, and it will help us prioritize within our group all together much better than before.”
The shared data created a common foundation for cross-functional conversations that were previously difficult to have. “Finally, we have a place where we are really talking to each other, we can be on the same page,” she added. Instead of engineering and product operating with different assumptions about team productivity and priorities, DX gave them objective data to align their roadmaps and resource allocation decisions.
Data-backed requests to platform teams: Another practical change was how Tamara’s teams interact with centralized infrastructure and platform engineering teams. Today, as she explains, “We made an action plan, what we can do ourselves, whether it is documentation, or it is ways of working, or which things we also would like to bring to other teams that can support us with this, our platform engineering teams or infrastructure teams. There are things that we would like to put top of the list for them, but now we have data to also back up our requests.” This shift from opinion-based to data-backed requests helps platform teams prioritize their roadmaps more effectively.
From gut feel to data: Perhaps most importantly, Tamara described how DX shifted her leadership approach: “We use DX data to make informed decisions about how to prioritize the next efforts in terms of increasing productivity within the team and improving their experience.” Instead of relying on scattered feedback or instincts, her teams now have concrete data to guide their improvements.
When teams have access to their own productivity data, something fundamental shifts. Instead of waiting for leadership to identify problems and impose solutions, teams start owning their improvements. The changes stick because they’re coming from the people who actually experience the friction every day.
See Tamara’s full story and learn how engineering leaders at Adyen use DX to measure and drive improvements to their ways of working. Watch the video here: