OVO streamlines engineering metrics collection with DX

OVO’s Developer Services team is responsible for ensuring fast and seamless experiences for engineers across the company. The team recognized early on that they needed a way to collect feedback from developers to inform their roadmap.

“We hire great developers that come to work everyday with the intention of doing their best work and making things happen,” says Tom Shaw, the leader of Developer Services within OVO’s Developer Services team. “But in every company there are processes, inefficiencies, or difficult tools to work with that slow them down. Our team is focused on figuring out what those things are.”

To help inform their team’s roadmap, they launched a recurring developer survey that collected feedback about different engineering tools and processes. Unfortunately, despite investing significant time into designing and administering the survey, response rates were low and the team didn’t feel confident in the reliability of the results.

“When we discovered DX, several aspects caught our attention," says Tom Shaw, Head of Developer Services. "The survey design’s academic-level approach and the automated survey delivery were particularly impressive to us.”

In their first survey using DX, OVO achieved a 93% participation rate with little time or effort required from the Developer Services team. Shaw says, “In my years of buying software, I don’t think I’ve ever gone from discovering something to a purchase decision as quickly as we did with DX.” OVO estimates they’ve saved at least $250,000 by offloading the work involved in developing, administering, and analyzing surveys.

Today, OVO’s Developer Services team uses DX to identify org-wide initiatives to reduce  friction for developers. Insights obtained from DX have guided key ongoing projects including their internal developer portal. “Anything could be put in a developer portal,” says Shaw. “We could just say ‘here’s what we think people want’ and go and build that. Instead, we use DX to prioritize what actually needs to be put in there.”