Curating a Developer Experience - A Hands-on Guide for Platform Engineers

The DevOps and SRE community is awash with discussions about product-focused platform teams. Teams manage their platforms, pipelines and tooling as a product. Helping development teams go fast by reducing time to market and operational complexity.

Enter the renewed focus on Developer Experience, with industry experts sharing their thoughts and opinions on conflicting definitions and their benefits.

As a Platform Engineer, how do you help your customers go quicker, which aspects of Developer experience should you care about and more importantly what do you actually do to curate an experience for them? What works? What doesn't? how do you know if it’s a success?

Andy is part of the Container Platform squad at Flutter UK and Ireland, which is home to some of the country's favourite betting and gaming brands. Since its inception in 2016, the container platform has been widely adopted across the business. In 2019 Andy was asked to head up a newly formed Platform Developer Experience team to help with some of the growing pains of a successful product and help increase its adoption. 

This talk explains what the customer experience team did, starting from scratch and how they have attained glowing feedback with recommendations from across the business. Andy will explain the practical things that were done, what worked (and what didn’t), how success was measured and how the focus of the team has evolved over the years.