Live From INTERACT: Microsoft's Developer Velocity Research

**Henrik Gütle** (0:00)
Adopting Agile practices without restructuring your teams is going to get you very far. Exactly, so this whole motion of companies with high developer velocity have really broken down their organization, created these small, more autonomous Agile teams that own their product end to end, and then combined with the technology side of the most recovered architectures and so forth, that was a big driver of high developer velocity.

**Conor Bronsdon** (0:22)
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Hi folks, Dev Interrupted's executive producer, Conor Bronsdon here again.
There are big changes in Dev Interrupted this week. Dan is getting married, so he is out. Because between that, our Dev Interrupted Interact Conference last week and LinearB's major growth, things are getting pretty wild around here, as you might imagine. With that in mind, I wanted to share one of our favorite sessions from Interact last week. I sat down with Microsoft's GM of Azure for Canada to get the inside scoop on their research and developer philosophy. Stay tuned until the end of the episode for a sneak peek in some of our upcoming episodes. We're almost a year in, we've got big plans to end season one with a bang and kickoff season two in November. And don't forget to rate and review the podcast.
Today, I've got with me Henrik Gütle to talk about Microsoft's research into developer velocity. Henrik is the general manager of Microsoft Azure. He's responsible for leading the commercial cloud business for Microsoft Canada. Thank you so much for joining us.

**Henrik Gütle** (1:47)
My pleasure, Conor, great to be here.

**Conor Bronsdon** (1:49)
Yeah, I'm super stoked to have you as part of Interact. This new research is really exciting.
Can you summarize the big takeaways for Microsoft's research in your developer velocity for everyone here?

**Henrik Gütle** (1:59)
Sure, I can at least try to get the all-developer velocity research actually spent two different parts and two different surveys that we had in the market. So let me just spend a couple of minutes kind of level setting on that.

**Conor Bronsdon** (2:11)
That'd be perfect.

**Henrik Gütle** (2:12)
Findings we got in both.
I think that the first set of put into market happened early 2012, so pre-COVID. We were researching just over 400 large companies around the world. And we were really trying to quantify what business impact does developer velocity has. And at the same time, getting a bit more crisp on what are some of the drivers behind developer velocity that have the biggest business impact. And as you could expect, like that survey found that there was a direct correlation between high developer velocity and business impact companies in the top quartile. How do you know that now?
Exactly, four to five times higher profit margin, more innovative and so forth.
But what I thought was really interesting on about first part of the survey was the drivers that make up the biggest impact or the drives that have the biggest impact because we looked at developer velocity across over 40 dimensions. And there were really four things that bubbled up to the surface. Like one was the importance of strong product management capabilities inside the organization. The second one was around culture. The third one was around developer tools and developer tool sets.
And the last one was around talent management. So out of all the 40 dimensions we looked at, these were by far the four most impactful as it pertains to driving high developer velocity.

**Conor Bronsdon** (3:25)
And then fast forward to the second piece, what were the kinds of outcomes you found there?

**Henrik Gütle** (3:29)
Yeah, so then in early 2021, May 2021, the second version of the survey, just to validate our findings, but also to take a closer look at like COVID and this whole shift to remote work actually have any impact on some of the findings. And in general, it was a very similar theme or very similar feedback we got. In this survey, we particularly looked at actually retail and financial service customers, in particular developer organizing inside those companies, because they were two industries that were pretty much on the front line as it pertains to the whole transformation.