Underdog’s formula for a high-output engineering culture

When Aaron Nunley stepped into a leadership role at Underdog, the company had already set aggressive hiring plans, and leadership was in the midst of defining the engineering culture they wanted to have. “Everyone wants a high-output engineering culture,” says Nunley. “You’re paying a lot for engineers, and you expect high output as a result. But we didn’t want to come at the problem by determining things like ‘how many code reviews are people doing,’ or their cycle times, churn rate, or defect rate, without understanding the full experience of our developers.”

Instead, Underdog’s leadership wanted to focus on the company’s ability to provide engineers with an environment where they could do their best work. Nunley adds, “I want people to solve problems for a living, not fight their developer tools.”

Nunley had used DX in his previous role at Eventbrite to measure engineering productivity and expose pain points. At the time, Eventbrite was using DX alongside Code Climate Velocity, as DX’s competitive Data Cloud solution did not yet exist. Velocity was being used as a way to measure the efficacy of the engineering organization through outputs, and Eventbrite brought in DX to better understand the inputs.

However, Velocity was not universally adopted, and the weaponization and gamification of the tool was evident. “I do still care about some of those metrics, but they’re secondary to making sure we have the right experience overall,” Nunley explains. “When I was evaluating DX at Underdog, the Data Cloud product made it so I could effectively get the data we were getting out of Velocity without putting it front and center.”

Nunley’s deep experience in leading engineering teams has allowed him to explore a wide range of tools for measuring developer productivity, and DX has clearly stood out: “We’re building a world-class engineering operation, which requires best in class tools. And if you look at the competitive landscape, the distinction with DX is that it is designed to help us take a more holistic approach to improving our engineering organization.”

Underdog’s strategy for creating a high-output culture focuses on continuous improvement at the team level. “It’s the engineering teams that can solve the vast majority of these problems, so we need to make sure we’re providing them with data they’ll use and encouraging them to solve their own problems,” says Nunley. “Then, if a problem needs more of a coordinated effort, it’ll be elevated to the middle management or senior leadership level using DX. Ultimately if you put time into these developer productivity initiatives, it ends up coming out on the other side. People feel more empowered to make their own work processes and practices better.”