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Nicole Forsgren

Episode #224

Partner at Microsoft Research

Microsoft Research (formerly GitHub, Google/DORA)

⚡Execution👥Team & Culture🎯Product Strategy

📝Full Transcript

13,738 words
Nicole Forsgren (00:00:00): 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. 80% of the folks that I work with, this is their biggest problem. Even at 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." (00:00:20): 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 (00:00:37): Welcome to Lenny's Podcast where I interview world-class product leaders and growth experts to learn from their hardware 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 pat leave for the past couple 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. (00:01:06): 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, improved 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. (00:01:32): Nicole also shares benchmarks for what elite companies are at. We talk about ...

💡 Key Takeaways

  • 1Speed and stability move together; shipping smaller batches more frequently reduces the 'blast radius' of errors.
  • 2Developer satisfaction is a leading indicator of productivity; when satisfaction drops, system reliability often follows.
  • 3Never measure developer productivity by lines of code or sheer activity metrics; it incentivizes the wrong behaviors.
  • 4Data from people (surveys) is often more accurate than data from systems (telemetry) because systems miss context (e.g., work done outside the repo).
  • 5AI is shifting developer work from writing code to reviewing code, which changes how we must measure productivity (focusing more on flow and cognition).
  • 6To improve strategy, start with 'Words' (goals) before 'Data' (metrics) to ensure you are measuring what actually matters.

📚Methodologies (3)

⚡ Execution

A widely adopted framework that uses four key metrics to classify engineering performance. It proves that high performers do not trade off speed for stability; they achieve both by reducing batch sizes and automating processes.

Core Principles

  • 1.Deployment Frequency: How often code is deployed to production (Elite: On-demand).
  • 2.Lead Time for Changes: Time from code commit to code running in production (Elite: < 1 day).
  • 3.Mean Time to Restore (MTTR): Time to restore service after an incident (Elite: < 1 hour).
  • +1 more...

"Speed and stability move together... If you push changes less frequently, you will have more unstable systems."

#(four#keys)#execution
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The SPACE Framework

by Nicole Forsgren

👥 Team & Culture

A multidimensional framework for measuring productivity. To use it correctly, teams should select metrics from at least three of the five dimensions to ensure a balanced view and avoid gaming the system.

Core Principles

  • 1.Satisfaction & Wellbeing: How developers feel about the tools and culture (e.g., Burnout, eNPS).
  • 2.Performance: Outcomes of the process (e.g., Reliability, Velocity).
  • 3.Activity: Count of actions (e.g., # of Commits, CI runs) - strictly coupled with other metrics.
  • +3 more...

"If you're talking about culture, this is totally different than if you're talking about friction in toolchains."

#space#team#culture
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🎯 Product Strategy

A visual tool to validate metrics. It separates the conceptual hypothesis (Words) from the measurement implementation (Data) to identify bad proxies or spurious correlations.

Core Principles

  • 1.Top Row (Words): Define the relationship conceptually (e.g., 'Customer Satisfaction' -> 'Return Business').
  • 2.Bottom Row (Data): Define the metrics acting as proxies (e.g., 'NPS' -> 'Retention Rate').
  • 3.Validation Step 1: Do the 'Words' actually make sense strategically?
  • +2 more...

"Always start with words. You do not start with data."

#four-box#(words#data)
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