In this post, Rene van Osnabrugge shares stories and lessons from the LEAD podcast, delving into the realities and evolving practices of developer experience and engineering culture.

Developer Experience: More Than a Buzzword

Author: Rene van Osnabrugge
Published on: June 5, 2025
Source: LEAD Podcast

In 2024, I created the LEAD podcast with my good friend Geert van der Cruijsen, where we explored the various aspects of building an engineering culture. With episodes featuring guests and solo discussions, I decided to share combined stories and insights gained from these conversations. Special recognition goes to Geert, our guests, and Xebia for their support.

DevX: Beyond Productivity

One early but significant distinction from our discussions: Developer productivity is an output, but developer experience (DevX) is what you provide. DevX is about enabling engineers—not about counting lines of code or deployment frequencies. The real focus should be on removing waste, and building systems, tools, and practices that allow engineers to concentrate on meaningful work.

For organizations with hundreds of product teams, enhancing DevX is not a luxury but a necessity for survival.

Discoverability: The Hidden Bottleneck

A recurring theme was that lack of tooling was not the main issue—instead, it was discoverability. While teams often have access to plenty of tools, the challenge is knowing which ones exist, how they work, and how to access them.

To address this, one guest’s company developed a developer portal to centralize:

  • Cloud account provisioning
  • API access
  • Documentation
  • Templates
  • Permissions and more

The aim was to make it a practical entry point, rather than just another management layer.

Many organizations mistakenly try to resolve inefficiencies by adding more tools, forgetting that clarity and accessible information are often more valuable.

Measuring Improvement

A key takeaway: You can’t improve what you don’t measure.

Improving developer experience shouldn’t be a vague aim, but should have tangible metrics. For example, measuring the time saved when provisioning cloud accounts after introducing the new portal provided real evidence of value. Time-saving metrics, when multiplied across all teams, yield a compelling business case.

Beyond just time, reducing friction also makes developers happier and more effective—benefits that may not immediately show on dashboards but still matter.

Documentation and the Role of GenAI

Documentation remains a pain point—hard to write, maintain, and often neglected. Yet, it remains crucial for an improved developer experience.

Some organizations are experimenting with generative AI (GenAI) tools integrated into developer portals. These allow developers to:

  • Chat with an assistant about APIs or capabilities
  • Get summaries of long documents
  • Ask context-aware questions on usage

While it’s still early in the adoption of GenAI for documentation, the promise is that accessing and consuming documentation could become much more efficient and less painful.

Starting Small or Scaling Up

For smaller companies, a full DevX platform may be unnecessary, but the principles still apply. Identify bottlenecks, repetitive tasks, and discoverability issues for your teams, even if there are only a handful.

Larger organizations should consider frameworks like Team Topologies to structure teams such as:

  • Stream-aligned teams
  • Platform teams
  • Enabling teams

This structural approach is often a precursor to successful DevX improvements.

Open conversations with teams—through interviews and surveys—are vital. Don’t assume the problems: sometimes what appears to be a tooling issue is actually an information or communication bottleneck.

Final Thoughts

Developer experience isn’t just a trendy concept; it’s about building systems to reduce friction, grant autonomy, and propagate good practices. Improved DevX does not only benefit engineers, but also speeds up and stabilizes product delivery, which directly improves customer outcomes.

DevX isn’t just DevOps with a different label—it’s about providing a better environment and fit for modern software teams.

Listen to the Original Episode

If you’d like to hear the full conversation, check out the original episode from the LEAD podcast.

Related Content

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