How Vercel measures and improves developer productivity

Vercel began growing their engineering headcount significantly beginning in early 2020. As the company grew, their leadership wanted to make sure that systems and processes weren’t impeding their developers’ productivity.

Vercel’s VP of Engineering, Lindsey Simon, had prior experience running internal developer surveys as a way to identify where teams were experiencing friction, and recognized the significant investment required to continually design and administer surveys on their own. By implementing DX, Vercel has saved hundreds of hours each year and been able to focus on interpreting and taking action based on their results. Simon explained: “When we discovered DX, a product that draws on research to ask the right questions in the context of software engineering, that was really appealing because we know how difficult that is.”

Nearly a year after adopting DX’s DevEx 360 product, Vercel implemented Data Cloud to capture system-based metrics in addition to self-reported data. Today, Vercel’s engineering organization uses the insights and trends captured in DX to ensure their engineers are as happy and productive as possible.

Identifying opportunities to improve

Since implementing DX, Vercel has sustained 95%+ participation rates on their quarterly developer surveys. Their DX dashboards, which include both self-reported and system-based metrics, are used by over 80% of teams to uncovering opportunities for engineering managers and executives to take action. Simon stated: "DX is like having a superpower within your organization to know what’s working and what’s not.”

Below are some examples of insights that DX has provided:

• The engineering team’s release process was a problem where the company needed to make a more coordinated effort to improve, so they formed a tiger team to focus on that area. “Sometimes you can encourage teams to tackle these issues, and sometimes you need to make more aggressive investments,” Simon explained.
• Teams were flagging cross-team collaboration as something they wanted to improve. “That was something we hadn’t really prioritized before,” Simon explains. “Since then we’ve instituted far better EM-IC ratios and done in-person meet-ups, and have seen real improvements there.”
• They have also used DX to gain insights about the onboarding process and how quickly new hires are able to get up to speed, which has been useful as the company has continue to grow quickly.

Driving continuous improvement

DX has helped Vercel continuously improve developer productivity through lightweight processes. Each quarter, engineering leadership shares key findings from DX along with themes that teams are focusing on. Engineering manager review results with their teams and select problems they plan to focus on and problems where they need additional support.

To encourage developers to focus on problems impacting their daily work, Vercel has begun promoting ‘scope of impact’ in their engineering Career Growth Framework. Simon explained: “If you can do work that affects the team or entire organization, that’s a high level of impact. If you can make the testing infrastructure faster, we can multiply that by the number of engineers and clearly see the impact.”