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Adyen uses DX to optimize developer productivity across 1,500 engineers

50% of teams achieve committed improvements with a data-driven approach

Adyen

Adyen, a global financial technology company, serves millions of users worldwide through its payment processing solutions. With around 1,500 engineers distributed across the globe, the company recognizes that developer productivity is fundamental to maintaining its competitive edge and delivering innovation at scale.

“You can’t improve what you can’t measure, but beyond that, I think it’s super important that you’re rooting the decisions you make in the actual data and the experience of your engineers,” explains Adyen’s CTO, Tom Adams.

For Adyen’s engineering organization, understanding and improving developer productivity had always been a priority, but measuring it effectively proved challenging. The company previously relied on in-house surveys to gather feedback from engineering teams, but the data was too surface-level to be actionable. “Our surveys were time-consuming to administer, and participation was lower than we hoped,” recalls Antoine Daignan, who leads Adyen’s Internal Developer Platform team. Gathering quantitative data was equally difficult: “The data comes from multiple systems and it’s a big puzzle to put together, even on normal workflows… Overall, we lacked a clear view of productivity and couldn’t confidently say whether we were improving over time.”

Partnering with DX gave Adyen a way to enable leaders across the organization to understand developer productivity and drive targeted improvements. “DX solves the critical problem of visibility,” says Adams. “Just getting access to that data has historically been super hard, and DX completely solves that for us.” Daignan adds, “We could have dedicated part of our organization to building a solution for getting data, but with DX we were able to get insights quickly and also have an expert partner along with us in our journey.”

“We could have dedicated part of our organization to building a solution for getting data, but with DX we were able to get insights quickly and also have an expert partner along with us in our journey.”
Antoine Daignan, Platform Engineering Leader, Adyen

Today, Adyen uses DX across three levels of the organization—leadership, platform teams, and individual engineering teams—to guide and drive productivity improvements. “From a leadership perspective, I really value the ability to see where we are in comparison to the industry,” says Adams. “That lets us set the bar, and gives us something that we can work toward. I find that super, super valuable.”

On the platform side, DX plays a central role in shaping priorities. “DX data is now an integral part of how we plan and prioritize in platform engineering,” says Daignan. “It’s also helped me make a strong case for the initiatives we want to invest in. When the data clearly supports something, it becomes much easier to align and move forward."

“From a leadership perspective, I really value the ability to see where we are in comparison to the industry. That lets us set the bar, and gives us something that we can work toward. I find that super, super valuable.”
Tom Adams, CTO, Adyen

At the team level, DX helps engineering managers, product managers, and their teams get on the same page about what’s slowing them down and what to fix first. “Prior to DX, we’d have retrospectives, talk to engineers, and come up with a list of things we needed to improve,” explains Tamara Sequeiros, Director of Engineering. “But we were never sure which problems were most important. Now that we have DX, we can look at it from a unified perspective and have a standardized way of talking about productivity. We are sharing the same language and looking at it more holistically.”

In just three months, Adyen has seen a noticeable shift in how leaders across the company use developer productivity data. “The thing that I’m most proud of is just how teams are using the data,” says Adams. "50% of the teams that said they would improve something have actually improved something, and we can see that with the data.”

“The thing that I’m most proud of is just how teams are using the data. 50% of the teams that said they would improve something have actually improved something, and we can see that with the data.”
Tom Adams, CTO, Adyen

This structured approach has been well-received by developers across Adyen’s engineering organization. “All the engineers in my team are completely excited about it,” says Sequeiros. “It’s not only quantitative data, but also qualitative data. They are really jumping at the opportunity and participation is super high.”

“All the engineers in my team are completely excited about it. It’s not only quantitative data, but also qualitative data. They are really jumping at the opportunity and participation is super high.”
Tamara Sequeiros, Director of Engineering, Adyen

Looking ahead, the company also plans to leverage DX to guide new initiatives, with one example being the rollout of AI tools. “We’re fairly early in our AI productivity journey at Adyen within engineering, but we’re super excited about what data will bring to visibility around the improvements that we hopefully will see,” explains Adams.

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