How eBay uses DX to benchmark and improve engineering productivity

As a global eCommerce leader, eBay is continually seeking new ways to make software delivery a competitive advantage for their business. The company recently embarked on a multi-year journey to improve developer velocity and, as part of this initiative, sought to surface insights about their developer experience.

Given eBay’s vast global presence and a workforce comprising more than 5,000 engineers, the task of capturing a holistic understanding of the developer experience presented a considerable challenge. Leaders attempted to surface insights by instrumenting system metrics and running internal surveys, however both failed to pinpoint opportunities that could be focused on to improve productivity.

eBay turned to DX, and was able to get a comprehensive view of the developer experience across their organization within weeks.

eBay now runs DX snapshots every quarter and maintains an average participation rate above 94%. The surfaced insights help leaders and teams identify areas of developer friction and a way to share and evaluate progress towards improvement. These insights are also shared as a way to steward change at the individual team level, and to date more than 25% of teams have used DX to define areas of focus and drive measured improvements.

As leaders continue to champion DevEx efforts at eBay, DX has been integral to understanding where opportunities exist.