Block Labs increases productivity by 4x with DX
In less than a year, fueled by surging demand for Web3 infrastructure, blockchain accelerator Block Labs experienced rapid growth. But that growth brought a new challenge: visibility into the engineering team’s performance began to slip. “In just a year, our technology team grew to over sixty people, all remote,” says Ricardo Ruiz, Chief Technology Officer. “That growth was exciting, but I quickly realized there’s no way I can be everywhere at once.” Ruiz needed visibility into how his fast-growing, globally distributed engineering team was performing and where inefficiencies were slowing them down.
To get that visibility, Ruiz evaluated two developer productivity platforms that integrated with Shortcut. With one developer productivity platform, they encountered challenges setting up integrations and were told that the platform wasn’t designed to support an organization of Block Labs’ size. “They just didn’t fit our needs,” Ruiz explains. “The integrations were difficult to configure, and for a team our size, they told me it wasn’t going to work.”
When evaluating DX, two factors immediately stood out: the breadth of integrations and the platform’s extensibility. “DX has a crazy amount of integrations,” says Ruiz. “I’m usually super busy and I don’t have anyone to take care of this, but I was able to do everything myself—set up the repository, configure the integrations, and map users.” He adds, “I could even bring in our own data if I wanted in the future. With many tools, you get constrained, but with DX, we’re not locked in.”
Initially, Block Labs wasn’t interested in self-reported data, but that changed after running a proof of concept. “At first, I wasn’t really interested in the survey-based data, I was interested in the quantitative side of the platform,” Ruiz says. “But the process of capturing developer feedback was pretty seamless. Even from the initial results, we saw the value of combining self-reported data with quantitative metrics. It helps leadership understand what’s really going on, especially when the numbers alone don’t tell the full story.” He adds, “DX bridges that gap between engineering work and business understanding.”
Ruiz also emphasizes the importance of starting measurement early. “We weren’t too small to start using DX at 20, 30, or 50 engineers,” he explains. “If we’d waited until we had 200, it would’ve been too late.”
Today, DX has become a core part of how Block Labs maintains visibility and drives improvement across its engineering organization. “It’s impossible for me to be in every place,” reiterates Ruiz. “People need access to this data so they can see where we’re not efficient, fix it themselves, measure it, and see results.” One clear example came with build times. “With DX, we immediately spotted a huge pain point that was flying under the radar. Builds were taking almost an hour. Once we saw that in the data and dug into it, we made a change and got build times down to ten minutes. That one fix saved our organization an estimated hundreds of hours of lost productivity and frustration.”
Finally, Block Labs highlights DX’s partnership and support as an important part of the value they receive. “We don’t have someone dedicated to implementing tools like this on our side,” Ruiz says. “Having DX’s customer success team guide us through setup and help us move fast was huge. I’ve seen vendors leave smaller customers alone mid-implementation. With DX, we never felt that.”
Looking ahead, Block Labs plans to deepen its use of DX as it continues to scale. The company’s focus is on doing more with less: enabling teams to move faster by removing friction and waste. “Our CEO’s strategy is simple: we want to have the same amount of impact and output as a team four times our size,” Ruiz says. “Being unproductive is wasting money. DX helps us see where that’s happening, fix it, and make sure every engineer can do their best work.”
