NIQ drives $5M in productivity gains with DX

NIQ, a leader in consumer intelligence, relies on thousands of developers to transform consumer data into products that inform customers’ sales and marketing strategies. Developer productivity is essential for building the systems that transform massive amounts of data into valuable insights.

“As a data company, being data-driven is very important to us. At the end of the day, it’s about productivity and letting engineers do their best work, taking the best advantage of their time,” says Daniel Machado, Global Head of Engineering.

Inefficiencies across nearly 200 engineering teams created challenges that existing tools couldn’t accurately identify or address. As VP of Technology Boris Morachov noted, “We tried using the tools and approaches we had in place, but they weren’t built to understand developer productivity.”

NIQ chose DX to measure and improve developer productivity. A key reason was DX’s Developer Experience Index (DXI), a metric that ties engineering performance to financial outcomes. The DXI measures factors like workflow efficiency and iteration speed, and benchmarks them against industry peers. As Boris Morachov explained, “DX felt like a tool that was built from scratch to understand what developers actually care about.”

With DX, NIQ captured data from over 90% of its engineers, generating thousands of data points on areas like code review processes, incident response, and development speed. DX created a culture of ownership among engineers. “Everyone within the engineering org uses DX…it’s about them acknowledging that there’s a problem or an issue, but also giving them the control and the empowerment to actually solve it,” says Moses Mansaray, Principal Software Engineer.

For leadership, DX provides insights and guides organizational priorities. Stacey Hudson, Head of Software Engineering shares, “For me, I’m looking at the trends of all my engineering teams, but often if there is a particular thing that I want to drill down to… it gives me just another dimension of understanding and also validating what I’m hearing…I don’t know if I’m going to be able to run an engineering department without DX.”

Since adopting DX, NIQ has increased its DXI score by 15 points over 18 months, representing an 11% reduction in developer time loss. Across NIQ’s global engineering organization, this translates to approximately $3M gained in developer productivity.

DX remains essential for measuring and enabling developer productivity. It’s also become a tool for business leaders to make strategic decisions. Looking ahead, NIQ plans to use DX to identify bottlenecks in processes like code reviews and deployments, benchmark team performance, ensuring engineers have the clarity and resources to do high-impact work.

For more on NIQ’s developer productivity journey, check out our customer video: