SiriusDX achieves $8M in productivity gains with DX

SiriusXM, long known as a leader in satellite radio, has evolved to compete in the streaming space. To keep pace with innovative competitors, the company launched a complete rebuild of its streaming platform in 2022—and, along with it, a retooling of developer infrastructure and tooling to maximize engineering velocity.

“This effort was about enabling us to move as fast as a modern technology company,” says Jared Wolinsky, VP of Platform Engineering. “But to do that, we needed more than new technology—we needed our developers to work efficiently and focus on innovation.”

The Platform Engineering team prioritized unblocking developers to meet aggressive timelines, but without clear data on their pain points, they couldn’t confidently prioritize efforts or measure success.

“It’s important for organizations like ours to measure how successful these initiatives are so we can show the impact we’re having on the company.” Wolinsky explains. “We also need metrics to inform our own efforts. Are we investing in the right areas? Should I be requesting more headcount on the observability team because it’s a source of pain for developers?”

SiriusXM adopted DX to collect better developer productivity data. “It became obvious that trying to replicate DX would require multiple full-time employees as well as data scientists to make sense of the data. And even then, we probably wouldn’t achieve the same level of polish and insights that DX provides,” Wolinsky shares. “DX showed us exactly where we were losing the most time and helped us take action. It was critical to understanding how to move forward.”

A bottleneck they identified was time spent configuring and troubleshooting local environments. To address this, they adopted virtual cloud-like environments for local testing. This allowed developers to simulate AWS services on their machines, significantly reducing setup time and debugging overhead. Through this and other investments, SiriusXM drove down developer time lost due to inefficiencies from 23% to 19%.

This 4% reduction in time lost translates to productivity gains: across SiriusXM’s entire developer organization, this equated to increasing engineering capacity by 26 FTEs, as well as saving $8M in lost time annually. “Using DX, we reduced time loss by 4%—the equivalent of adding 26 full-time engineers at our scale—without increasing headcount,” says Wolinsky.

With their new platform launched, SXM will continue making measurable improvements for developers. Using DX, the team has created a vision of the ideal developer workflow, from onboarding to deployment and observability. “DX is central to how we measure and improve developer productivity,” Wolinsky concludes. “Its insights help us align our roadmap and deliver value where it matters most.”

For more on SiriusXM’s journey of tackling developer productivity, check out our podcast.