How to measure and improve developer productivity | Nicole Forsgren (Microsoft Research, GitHub, Google)

**Nicole Forsgren** (0:00)
Starting with, what is your problem or what is your goal? I would say this is a bigger challenge than most people recognize or realize. Eighty percent of the folks that I work with, this is their biggest problem, even at like executive levels. Teams will have gone off for several months and they're tackling something and they'll come back with uncertainty and they'll say like, well, you told me to improve developer experience. I'm like, okay, what do you mean by this? Are you talking about inner and outer loop? Are you talking about friction? Are you talking about culture? But if you're talking about culture, this is totally different than if you're talking about friction in toolchains. If you're on different pages, you're heading in completely different directions.

**Lenny Rachitsky** (0:37)
Welcome to Lenny's podcast where I interview world-class product leaders and growth experts to learn from their hard-won experiences building and growing today's most successful products. Today, my guest is Nicole Forsgren. This is actually my first recording back since going on Patlee for the past couple of months, and what an awesome episode to get back into the swing of things.
Nicole is the Developer Productivity Expert having written the award-winning book, Accelerate, and she's been the co-author of the State of DevOps Report year after year. She's currently a partner at Microsoft Research, leading Developer Productivity Research and Strategy, and she's helped some of the biggest companies in the world move faster, improve product quality, and transform their cultures.
In our conversation, we get into the weeds of how to go about measuring and improving your engineering team's productivity and experience. We talk about the DORA framework and the space framework and how to actually implement them to understand how your engineering team is doing. Nicole also shares benchmarks for what elite companies are at. We talk about why moving faster turns out to be one of the best ways to improve quality and stability, plus pitfalls you want to avoid, and also a preview of a new book that she's working on, and so much more.
Enjoy this episode with Nicole Forsgren after a short word from our sponsors.
Today's entire episode is brought to you by DX, a platform for measuring and improving developer productivity. DX is designed by the researchers behind frameworks such as Dora, Space, and DevEx, including Nicole Forsgren, who is my guest for this very episode. If you've tried measuring developer productivity, you know that there are a lot of basic metrics out there and a lot of ways to do this wrong. And getting that full view of productivity is still really hard. DX tackles this problem by combining qualitative and quantitative insights based on the very research Nicole and her team have done, giving you full clarity into how your developers are doing. DX is used by both startups and Fortune 500 companies, including companies like Twilio, Amplitude, eBay, Brex, Toast, Pfizer, and Procter & Gamble. To learn more about DX and get a demo of their product, visit their website at getdx.com/lenny. That's getdx.com/lenny.
Nicole, welcome to the podcast.

**Nicole Forsgren** (2:54)
Thank you so much. I'm excited to be here.

**Lenny Rachitsky** (2:56)
I'm excited to have you here.
I actually skip this question usually with guests, but I thought it'd be actually really valuable to spend a little time on your background. You have such a unique role and unique set of experiences. Could you just talk briefly about the things you've been up to in your career, where you've worked, and then what you're up to now and what you focus on these days?

**Nicole Forsgren** (3:15)
Sure. And I appreciate the question because you're right. I sort of had this like choose your own adventure background. So I started as a software engineer at IBM. I was writing software for large enterprise systems, which meant I ended up running them. So I was also a sysadmin. I was racking and stacking.
I was running these really, really large labs. And then I kind of stumbled into this seven-day march for several years. And I was like, there has to be a better way. We're hearing like rumors of it, but like management was not buying in. And so I decided to win this battle with data.
And I was like, I should go do a PhD.
And so ended up kind of taking a slight pivot into PhD and management information systems, which some people are less familiar with, but it's basically a cross between tech and business. And I ended up getting a fairly technical PhD. So I went to a school, I went to University of Arizona, which has a very, very technical degree. But I liked that it crossed with business because then I had the ability to make these strong business case statements. Right. So it was like, how is or is the way that we develop and deliver software tied to outcomes at the individual level? Right. Can I be more productive? Can I have better work-life balance? And the team level is the team more productive, is the team more efficient and the organizational level. Right. This is what I was really interested in originally. Do I see better ROI? Do I see better efficiency? Because then I could sell it to people. Right. And so that was really kind of what I originally went into. And then I was a professor for a handful of years, because if you're doing research, traditionally, that's the job in academia. I also had a master's in accounting, because that really helped me make that kind of financial tie and understanding financial statements.