Intercom boosts developer productivity 20% with DX

Intercom provides tools for personalized customer communication through live chat, email, and automated messaging. Their success depends on delivering products quickly to stay ahead in a competitive market. With over 200 engineers, this requires tools, workflows, and a culture that empowers developers to ship features efficiently.

“Developer productivity is central to how we innovate and deliver value,” says Iain Breen, Senior Engineering Manager. “We want engineers to feel like they can do their best work here, supported by tools that work in their favor rather than slowing them down.”

Before DX, Intercom used manual surveys and an in-house metrics platform to track developer productivity, but these methods were tedious and insufficient. “We spent too much time preparing the data and not enough solving the actual problems,” says Breen.

DX automates feedback collection and reporting, integrating quantitative and qualitative data to provide a clear view of bottlenecks. This freed Infrastructure Services to focus on strategic priorities. “DX provided clarity we didn’t have before,” Breen says. “It aligned perfectly with how we approach developer experience.”

Using DX, Breen’s team surfaced inefficiencies in their remote development environments. Developers faced connectivity and synchronization issues, prompting a switch to local setups. “Purely due to engineer feedback in DX, we found that local setups provided a much better experience,” says Breen. These changes reduced developer time lost by 20%.

DX also empowered teams to act independently by providing direct access to data and clear feedback. “DX democratizes our data, allowing every engineer and manager to review insights and drive improvements,” Breen explains. A reduced reliance on centralized decision-making enabled teams to solve problems faster and allowed Infrastructure Services to focus on larger strategic priorities

With DX, Intercom has shifted from reactive fixes to proactive improvements. Teams address bottlenecks faster, while the Developer Experience Program focuses on long-term goals. “We’re at a different level now than we were in the past. DX has transformed how we approach developer experience,” says Breen.

With ambitious plans for growth in the business, Intercom plans to continue to use DX to refine metrics like deployment and incident resolution times. “DX isn’t just a tool,” Breen adds. “It’s a foundation for improving productivity across the organization.