When a team embraces the platform-as-a-product concept, they treat the product development teams as valuable "users" or "customers" consuming their services. In this talk, we delve into the transformative power of adopting a user-centric approach that is required across all stages of platform developement: from understanding user needs and building the platform, to fostering adoption, offering support, and prioritising future enhancements. This holistic approach brings higher improvements in developer experience and productivity, both to the product development teams and to the teams that build the platforms.
We will uncover the following key user-centric practices employed by the Developer Experience (DevEx) group at Nexthink, showcasing how the self-service platforms they have implemented have notably improved the developer productivity and experience.
- Creating well-established platform teams with clear mission and roadmaps.
- Establishing the team API of well-known communication channels, as well as clear and comprehensive messaging and promotion of initiatives.
- Engagement of early adopters for tailoring the platform and its documentation for different use cases.
- Easing adoption and following the progress of required changes with our launch toolbox.
- Providing high quality product, fast support and resolution of issues for a great user experience.
Interview:
What's the focus of your work these days?
As the Engineering Manager of our DevEx group at Nexthink, I lead three amazing teams focused on creating platforms that improve the productivity and experience of our development teams. This year, our main focus is on revamping the CI/CD processes and tooling, as well as on enhancing our data infrastructure.
What's the motivation for your talk at QCon London 2024?
In the past two years, we have transformed our generic DevOps team into smaller platform teams that form the DevEx group today. As we started focusing on improving the developer productivity and experience, we unraveled the high importance of user-centricity in our actions. We also established practices that help us in launching and completing projects that require adoption by the development teams. With this talk, I would like to share with the audience the learnings and practices that fueled our success.
How would you describe your main persona and target audience for this session?
The target audience is engineers, architects, and managers of platform and enablement teams who are building platforms and providing services for their product development teams.
Is there anything specific that you'd like people to walk away with after watching your session?
I would like the attendees to leave with:
- An understanding of the high importance and positive impact of user-centricity on the success of platform teams.
- Inspiration for actionable items that would improve the practices in their teams and organizations.
Speaker
Ana Petkovska
Engineering Manager of the Developer Experience Group @Nexthink, Holds a PhD in Logic Synthesis
Ana Petkovska is deeply passionate about optimisation and reliability improvements. As an Engineering Manager of the Developer Experience (DevEx) group at Nexthink, she drives initiatives to enhance the developer productivity and experience by optimising the internal processes and tools of the Engineering department. She is also in quest of best practices to increase the impact and efficiency of her DevEx group. Prior to joining Nexthink, Ana obtained a PhD degree for the thesis entitled "Exploiting Satisfiability Solvers for Efficient Logic Synthesis". Her research brings novel logic synthesis algorithms that accelerate the production of electronic circuits while making the circuits smaller and faster.
Find Ana Petkovska at:
Date
Wednesday Apr 10 / 02:45PM BST ( 50 minutes )
Location
Whittle (3rd Fl.)
