Developer experience (DX) has become essential to modern enterprise software development. As more companies become software companies, more are opening up their software both for internal reuse and externalized consumption. As part of this process, making developer-facing tools consumable and friction-free becomes more necessary to both perform well and stand out in the market.
To oversee developer experience quality within an organization, an entire new role is beginning to emerge — the chief developer experience officer (CDXO). A CDXO is in charge of ensuring the intuitiveness of developer-facing toolsets and being an advocate for engineering needs. Such a focus could improve internal platform usability, like within platform engineering initiatives. Or, it may involve improving the developer experience for public or partner APIs through quality documentation, SDKs, libraries, forums, tutorials and more. A CDXO might interface with many departments to monitor and improve DX across the organization.
Since the role is in its very early stages, few CDXOs exist. But I tracked down a few to gather insights on the emerging position—I had the unique opportunity to sync with Alessandro Cauduro, chief developer experience officer at Azion and Ivan Burazin, chief developer experience officer at Infobip. They both shared some fantastic insights on why DX is so important these days and what qualities make a good developer experience leader. Below, I’ll distill their wisdom and take a peek into the life of a CDXO.
Why DX is Important
First, it’s good to reiterate that developer experience is increasingly important for several reasons. Organizations want to build and ship applications faster and more securely. Yet, it can be difficult for programmers to keep up with new technology trends. “Technology is always changing, and developers are always having to try new things,” said Cauduro. “As a result, you rarely become an expert on a single platform.”
Developer experience helps you get up and running quickly with new tools. The mindset is similar to user experience (UX) but more applicable to different interaction points like APIs, CLIs, SDKs, VSCode plugins, libraries or other developer-facing technologies. Improving usability for these packages helps ease the daily grind, increases productivity and can be a competitive advantage, said Cauduro. He added that a benchmark of great developer experience is when you don’t even have to read the documentation to understand what you have to do.
“I think that developers are the lifeblood of innovation,” said Burazin. “They are the ones creating solutions and implementing transformative technologies. Yet, they are often let down when it comes to the tools they use to achieve this innovation, so providing a great developer experience is paramount if we want to foster that innovation as much as possible.”
CDXO Roles and Activities
So, what does a day in the life of a CDXO officer look like? What are some of their roles and responsibilities? According to Cauduro, the overarching goal is to put himself in the developer’s shoes—he constantly thinks about common developer workflows and considers how to create a seamless experience throughout the entire development life cycle.
Next is spreading awareness throughout the company about DX principles and how to increase DX within their offerings. A CDXO will likely answer directly to executive leadership but might interface with many departments. A CDXO may direct teams to construct developer-specific tools, like libraries, documentation, SDKs and self-service environments. “DX is a mindset,” said Cauduro. “The whole company needs to be engaged in it.”
“As with any C-level position, your job is on the one hand to make your team’s life easier in any way you can,” said Burazin. “And on the other to convey the developers’ issues or ideas to the company in hopes of nudging the company in the correct direction.”
A CDXO may also oversee developer relations efforts, which focus on fostering a developer community. There are many ways to interface with partners and clients to exchange ideas on how to build against the platform, Cauduro explained. This includes promoting open source projects, encouraging user meetings or interacting on Discord and forums to provide answers to community questions.
Qualities That Make a Good CDXO
The CDXO position isn’t for everyone. So, what personality traits make a good candidate for the role? Here are some of the necessary qualifications for the type of work:
- Experience as a programmer. A CDXO should have past experience as a professional developer. Engineering knowledge will help them understand the persona and empathize with their needs.
- Leadership qualities. The role also requires leadership expertise, as a CDXO must have the ability to coordinate and influence many different areas of the company.
- Creativity. Since the role is pretty nascent without a written path, it will require creativity. Having the ability to experiment, accept feedback and reiterate is also important, said Cauduro.
- Empathy. Communication skills and empathy also go a long way. “Deep engineering knowledge crossed with great people skills is the mix you would need for such a task,” said Burazin.
Developer Experience in Practice
At Azion, Cauduro is interested in how its tools can help developers move solutions from the cloud to the edge more seamlessly. To that end, they’ve found that Jamstack fits well with the needs of edge computing. Thus, some of his efforts focus on making the process of deploying a Jamstack app to the edge as seamless as possible for engineers.
While DX efforts have helped address development bottlenecks at Azion, the role of CDXO may not be necessary within all companies, admitted Cauduro. It’s more of a fit for API-first or SaaS companies that target developers as a primary consumer base. That being said, other companies can still benefit from a developer experience focus to enhance their internal IT platforms.
At InfoBip, Burazin explained that developer experience efforts center around helping external developers consume the InfoBip API, an API for all communication channels, such as SMS, voice, WebRTC and more. Sitting under the CTO, Burazin helps run three teams and DX has its own department. Impressively, he reports revenue on self-service APIs has increased fivefold in the past two years.
Burazin, also the co-founder of Codeanywhere, explained that his role is to “convey the worries or needs of the developer customers to management and help steer the ship in the right direction.” To discover those needs, he recommends ‘dogfooding’ what the customer is experiencing and streamlining the onboarding process to be as self-service as possible. He also recommends having measurable insights on metrics you can directly impact, like decreasing time from discovery to ‘hello world.’
Final Thoughts
Developer experience is becoming a unique selling point for technology companies—so much so that it’s entered the C-suite. “Whoever has the better DX will have the leading edge,” said Cauduro. For him, it’s about finding small things to optimize that remove pain points from the developer’s process.
To summarize, the role of CDXO is still evolving and not set in stone. And, granted, many different labels are being applied to describe similar objectives. But to get an idea of what the CDXO role entails, some common activities include:
- Considering the perspective of the developer.
- Engaging the entire company to prioritize DX.
- Overseeing the construction of DX-related assets and resources such as tutorials, documentation and guides.
- Collecting feedback and reiterating platforms.
- Overseeing developer relations and advocacy teams.
Looking to the future, developer experience will likely become more of a necessity as developer-driven purchasing habits become a real revenue driver. “This bottom-up go-to-market motion will help awareness and increase sales,” said Burazin. And, to helm this movement, more companies may adopt DX within a C-suite title. But of course, the role may look different from company to company as DX is applied in different ways.
“If we look at the largest technology companies, almost all of them have a developer experience department in their organization. And this is due to the fact that so much of a developer’s productivity is directly linked to their experience while working,” said Burazin. Things like internal developer portals and standard cloud deployments will help improve developer experience and help them focus on what they do best, which is coding, he said.
