Disclaimer: This summary has been generated by AI. It is experimental, and feedback is welcomed. Please reach out to info@qconlondon.com with any comments or concerns.

Fabien Deshayes, a Platform Engineering Manager at Monzo, presents a talk on achieving optimal efficiency with Developer Experience (DevEx) teams, drawing from his experience at Monzo and Spotify.

Key Topics Discussed:

Introduction to Monzo's Developer Experience Team: Started in December 2023 with a small team focused on building an experimentation platform to improve engineering velocity.
Improving Experimentation: The old platform was replaced, doubling experiments from 70 to 134 and reducing decision time from 43 to 21 days.
Assembling a DevEx Team: Importance of finding engineers with product acumen, tenure in the company, and good soft skills.
Impactful Products: Designing products that align with company values and solving real problems.
Communicating the Impact: Use metrics like time, money, productivity, adoption, and future enablement to measure and communicate the product's impact.

Challenges and Strategies:

Building a diverse DevEx team without needing “superstar” engineers but focusing on skill alignment and collaboration.
Understanding and utilizing product frameworks like the Core 4 and SPACE for measuring productivity.
Ensuring adoption through a balance of "carrot and stick" strategies—creating compelling products and sometimes requiring adoption.

Conclusion: The talk focuses on assembling the right team, creating impactful DevEx products, and effectively communicating their impact. It emphasizes integrating into an organization's engineering culture as a key strategy for enhancing developer experience.

This is the end of the AI-generated content.

Developer Experience teams are quite popular these days as organisations understand the value of optimising for developers productivity.

At Monzo, we have a Developer Experience team that aims to meaningfully increase velocity by landing exceptional developer experiences, for example we delivered a Feature Flag and Experimentation Platform across Monzo to increase experimentation by 50%.

In this presentation, we bring you insights and learnings from our experience, with particular focus on:

Getting the right people and tools in place for a successful Developer Experience team
Building impactful Developer Experiences that matter
Communicating effectively about the impact of a Developer Experience team

Interview:

What is the focus of your work?

I am an Engineering Manager, focusing on enabling my teams to achieve operational excellence in order to deliver delightful experiences to the rest of the engineering organisation at Monzo.

What’s the motivation for your talk?

Developer Experience (DexEx) is still a very new practice and I believe it is not well understood across organizations. I want to share my experience building and operating DevEx teams.

Who is your talk for?

Any engineer who wants to make an impact in the DevEx space, or any engineering leader who wants to learn how to support engineers in this space.

What do you want someone to walk away with from your presentation?

I want them to be convinced that you need strong product acumen to be a great DevEx engineer.

What do you think is the next big disruption in software?

I see a lot of potential in platforms that enable integration between AI agents to leverage multiple models across user flows, and not limited to discrete tasks.

Speaker

Fabien Deshayes

Engineering Manager - Platform & Developer Experience @Monzo, Previously @Spotify

Fabien is a Platform Engineering Manager at Monzo, where he leads the Developer Experience team in order to meaningfully increase velocity of engineers by landing exceptional developer experiences. Prior to Monzo, Fabien worked as an Engineering Manager at Spotify where he contributed to Backstage, the open source Developer Portal; in particular Fabien looked at how organizations can scale successfully by creating platform products.