Thumbtack selects DX for engineering insights
At Thumbtack, the leading online marketplace connecting homeowners with skilled professionals, a small Developer Experience team supports a 250-person engineering organization by improving the tools and workflows engineers rely on every day. As Thumbtack increased its investment in AI tooling, and expanded the DevEx team to support that rollout, the need to clearly understand and demonstrate the impact of those investments on developer productivity became more urgent. “Any investment we make in our tooling, or any improvement we find to make developers more productive, has a force-multiplying impact that boosts the entire organization,” says Brian Leathem, Senior Engineering Manager on the Developer Experience team. “We’ve always needed data to guide our decisions and understand the impact we’re having, but AI raised the stakes.”
Before Thumbtack’s investments in AI, the Developer Experience team stitched together multiple sources of feedback and data to understand where to invest and how effective their efforts were. They ran their own surveys, hosted feedback forums and office hours, and collected input through Slack channels. While this qualitative feedback was valuable, it was expensive to collect, difficult to analyze, and hard to run consistently over time. In parallel, the team tracked some quantitative metrics, but definitions and coverage varied widely across platform teams, making comparisons and trend analysis unreliable. “We had signal, but it wasn’t cohesive,” says Brian Leathem. “Between the cost, the inconsistency, and the gaps in our quantitative data, we often found ourselves planning with more intuition than we were comfortable with.”
As Thumbtack prepared to significantly increase its investment in AI tooling, those limitations became harder to ignore. Leadership wanted clearer insight into productivity and ROI, and needed a more scalable, repeatable way to measure impact. Rather than continuing to build and maintain their own patchwork of tools and processes, the team decided to explore external platforms that could provide a more complete and consistent view. They kicked off a formal build-versus-buy evaluation, assessing vendors based on their ability to combine qualitative and quantitative data and integrate with Thumbtack’s existing tools.
Thumbtack evaluated multiple vendors as part of its developer productivity initiative. Through that process, the team determined that guidance and built-in expertise mattered more than maximum configurability. “We realized we didn’t want to spend time defining and maintaining everything ourselves,” says Brian Leathem. “What we wanted was a system that reflected proven patterns and helped us move faster with confidence.” DX’s approach, combining strong opinions with practical flexibility, aligned well with those goals.
One analogy Leathem brought up validated the DevEx team’s concerns. “We viewed some of the products we evaluated as off-road vehicles, ones in which we could blaze any trail we wanted,” says Brian Leathem. “But in thinking about it, we realized we didn’t want to be off blazing trails. We wanted to leverage a path that had already been thought through. DX gave us those strong opinions and built-in expertise, without taking away the flexibility we actually needed.”
Additionally, DX’s ability to tightly connect qualitative and quantitative data proved to be the most differentiating factor. Rather than treating surveys and system metrics as separate inputs, DX made it possible to see how developer sentiment correlated with real usage and outcomes. “What ultimately changed my mind was how DX married qualitative and quantitative data,” says Brian Leathem. “That connection of understanding not just what was happening, but how developers felt about it was something we couldn’t get elsewhere without a lot of extra work.”
Since rolling out DX, Thumbtack’s DevEx team has quickly seen the benefits of having a single, cohesive system for understanding developer productivity. One immediate win was participation. “When we put out the DX snapshot, we hit 95% participation in the first week, which was a significant improvement over our homegrown survey,” Leathem says. “The response from our developers was incredible. That changed how confident we felt in the data.”
Even at this early stage, DX is already shaping conversations and priorities. Initial insights surfaced concrete opportunities across deployment reliability, CI/CD pipelines, and local development workflows, giving the team specific data to investigate further rather than relying on anecdote. Looking ahead, Thumbtack plans to use DX as a shared foundation for guiding platform investments and evaluating the impact of its growing AI toolset. “DX gives us confidence that we’re investing in the right things. It allows us to maximize the scale and importance of the work we’re doing.”
