How Block is accelerating engineering velocity

This story was originally covered on CIO.com.

Block is an ecosystem of brands that includes Square, Cash App, Spiral and TIDAL, all united by the shared purpose of economic empowerment. Driven by over 4,000 engineers and thousands of interconnected software systems, Block’s relentless focus on speed has helped the company empower more than 50 million individuals and four million sellers. Today, Block is doubling down on engineering velocity, investing in major initiatives to help teams ship software even faster.

“We want engineering velocity to remain our competitive advantage,” said Azra Coburn, Block’s Head of Developer Experience. “Block is a large and complex organization, and it’s still growing. We realized that if we wanted to operate at the speed of a startup, we needed to make a more dedicated investment.”

With this aim, Block has established a global developer experience function focused on empowering developers to innovate rapidly and deliver high-quality products. This article goes behind the scenes on what’s fueling Block’s investment in developer experience, their key initiatives, and how they measure and drive success.

Sustaining velocity at scale

Block’s approach to developer experience has evolved significantly as the company has grown. In the early days, different teams and business units operated independently, each with their own tools and workflows. While this freedom initially enabled rapid time-to-market, it also resulted in complexity as the company grew to include multiple business units and thousands of developers.

“With different teams and business units working in different ways, the cognitive load for developers became significant,” explains Coburn. “ It required us to rethink our workflows and change how teams were structured.”

To maintain high velocity at scale, Block recognized the opportunity to unite the engineering function around standardized tools and workflows, or “golden paths.” The aim is to reduce duplication while investing in a core set of patterns and tools, enhancing productivity and fostering a culture of continuous improvement.

Setting the roadmap

Block’s developer experience team determines their roadmap using quantitative and qualitative data to identify opportunities and measure impact. With this approach, they’ve identified opportunities to reclaim over 500k hours of developer time annually.

“Our approach is to first and foremost listen to our internal customers, who are our engineers,” says Coburn. “We run a quarterly survey that directly contributes towards our roadmap in developer experience, helping decide how we invest and prioritize. Our investments are driven by what we hear from our engineers.”

Block collects developer experience data with the help of DX, an engineering intelligence platform that helps streamline data collection and reporting, as well as enabling Block to benchmark themselves against industry peers.

Through the DX platform, Block is able to provide developer experience metrics to all leaders and teams across the company. “We value working in the open, so we’ve opened the survey responses up to everyone,” Coburn explains. “Every engineer has access to look at their team’s data and everyone else’s data, and benchmark themselves against our industry peers.”

Coburn’s team also publishes an annual internal State of Engineering Velocity report highlighting key metrics and benchmarks captured in DX. “We have four key metrics that we’ve nicknamed DEVIQ,” shares Coburn. “This stands for developer experience, velocity, impact and quality. Our approach is derived from the DX Core 4 framework, and we track these metrics across Block both as a company and at the team level.” Block reports on progress for the DEVIQ quarterly to their entire executive team.

Block’s vision

Guided by their data, Block has identified core priorities for improving developer experience, the most notable being instant developer environments, establishing golden paths, and bold investments in AI. Together, these initiatives form the Developer Experience team’s vision for accelerating engineering velocity.

Instant developer environments

Block’s quarterly developer survey has highlighted several key areas for improvement, one of which is the delays engineers faced in setting up and iterating on local development environments. A key pillar of Block’s strategy is their “InstantDev Vision” focused on building a best-in-class internal developer platform where, as Coburn puts it, “everything just works.”

“We are building a collection of developer tools that are turnkey,” Coburn explains. “We’ll need faster local builds, projects to be self bootstrapping, or hermetic, and services to be run ephemerally. We want zero-click configuration—environments that just work and allow engineers to focus on delivering business value.”

Investing in golden paths

Establishing golden paths is a priority. Consolidating their toolchain down to a small number of focused investments gives developers leverage. “It allows us to have a handful of tools that are curated and focused,” Coburn explains. “These select choices can then be of high quality, well-supported, documented, maintained, secure, and reliable.”

Another golden path is reducing time spent on information search and discovery, which Block estimates could save up to another 200k hours of developer time annually. “We’re consolidating all of our documentation into one platform across Block that is heavily integrated with AI to assist with search and content.”

Leveraging AI

AI sits at the cornerstone of Block’s developer experience strategy. Through their AI native instant developer environment Block is actively embedding AI in all engineering workflows. “Our goal is to increase speed to market by 10x and improve efficiency across all aspects of software development” says Coburn. “For example, most recently we have built an AI migrator tool. Migrations from legacy codebases that used to take teams months to complete can now be done in hours.”

Block has also launched an open source AI Agent Codename Goose. Engineers can use Goose to pull Jira tickets, automatically create pull requests, and even pre-fill them with code. Unlike other tools that simply generate code, Goose acts as a full agent—developers can assign it tasks, and it delivers results.

Block expects their efforts in AI Engineering Velocity to deliver a 30% boost in productivity while significantly improving reliability and employee engagement. By automating bottlenecks with AI tools, engineers are empowered to focus on innovation, advancing product development and fueling the company’s growth in fintech.

Delivering incremental success

Delivering on Block’s ambitious vision does not happen overnight. Rather, Coburn’s team optimizes for fast experimentation and a metrics-driven approach. “We’re very experimental and fast to fail,” Coburn shares. “Each quarter we find where the biggest pain points are, and we tackle those problems incrementally, while staying aligned to our broader vision.”

Block’s vision reflects the company’s commitment to sustaining fast-paced engineering velocity. Their investments aim to position Block’s engineering teams to continue innovating at scale while keeping the company’s position as a leader in the market.