Finding the ROI in developer enablement programs

Think of when you were in the zone on a project, fleshing out details and specifics with all the attention and care they called for. Efficiency was your middle name. Flowstate was your best friend, and the outcome was top-tier.

It’s likely you were able to reach that state because the infrastructure and boilerplate elements were taken care of, freeing your mind of nonessential cognitive loads. You were enabled to do your best work in one form or another.

How should your company and team handle developer enablement, and why does it matter?

Our guest Christian Oestreich, Vice President of Architecture at WEX, joins us to dive into how to prioritize your developer enablement programs, getting comfortable with soft and hard metrics, and best practices for using automation to improve developer enablement and keep your team in the flow.

Why does developer enablement matter for overall success?

Quality drives efficiency, and developer enablement helps drive quality. The more time your teams can spend in the flow, the better the quality and the higher the efficiency.

The return investment of developer enablement 

The reason for doing most anything in business is to be faster, better, or cheaper — or all three together, in a perfect world — It’s hard to say what the return will be when investing in developer enablement until the plans are laid, and you have an idea of what needs adjusting.

“A big focus for us is looking at ‘How do we remove our assumption-based measurements and start using actual quantifiable metrics that we can measure in actual dollars?’” Christian says. 

In other words: Determine which section of your process is best to start with and measure how much time repetitive tasks consume. From there, you can test solutions and measure against real reports to watch for the most significant impact. After all, time is money. 

How does measuring metrics help ensure software quality?

As Christian puts it, “The hardest thing to measure is the thing that didn't happen.” Which, when you practice assumption-based measurement, is the standard. It’s tricky to measure a cyber attack that may or may not have happened if you hadn’t implemented XYZ software. 

“Those are the super hard ones to quantify, that we struggle with,” he says. “Because as we raise the quality bar, we're doing a lot of precursory scans, we're moving a lot of those activities to early in the lifecycle of the SDLC to save time in production, which is like the cost avoidance paradigm.”

In those situations, if it’s likely a tool will save you one incident worth 1 million dollars, it’s worth the investment regardless of a tangible threat. It pays for itself in prevention.

“When you're in certain industries, there's a lot of compliance things you have to make sure that you're conforming to, and reducing that risk is a huge benefit to the organization, especially when you automate away the risk reduction,” he continues. 

What does it mean to modernize a system?

For Christian, modernization meant automation. He and his team needed a streamlined process for deploying microservices and a way to handle complex relational queries around their eventing offerings.

“Reducing the complexity of the process was a huge financial boost because we were able to scale out to 1000s of microservices,” he says. “When we wanted to build a new thing, we didn't bake it into the core systems, we just built a new microservice to do it.”

The second initiative they focused on was to increase the usability of their software to lower costs and deliver a better, quicker experience for users.

“We asked ‘How can we pre compose — using stream composition — these big datasets that we have, essentially cached instances of these relational queries?’ and we went all in on the CDC pattern, and started precomposing the datasets,” he says, “We were able to reduce minutes of execution down to milliseconds of execution.”

Modernization solves tangible problems with lasting impact. To leverage it correctly, you must understand the pain points of your team and end users, and both sides of the fence should be enabled to do their best work and get the results they want.

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Interested in learning more? Listen to our full conversation with Christian, where we explore developer enablement, dive into the importance of modernization, why metrics are critical for ensuring software quality, and more. Listen on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or your favorite podcast player.