How Senior Tech Pros View Developer Experience and Delivery Challenges
Many Developer Experience [DevEx] reports focus on the perspective of developers themselves—and rightly so. Developers are on the front lines, dealing with the day-to-day challenges that impact their ability to deliver quality software efficiently.
But while developer input is crucial, it’s equally important to understand how senior tech pros like Heads of Engineering view these challenges.
During and after my DevEx talk with industry experts Ben Darfler, Director of Engineering at honeycomb.io, and Jon Kern, Co-author of the Agile Manifesto from Adaptavist, we explored this broader perspective. We asked nearly 50 senior leaders and tech pros questions to capture their thoughts on DevEx. Here’s what we discovered.
What’s the biggest issue your developers face in delivering software? Quality emerged as the top concern, but ease of delivery also ranked high.
Ben and Jon used a metaphor that captures this balance well: If your car is broken, you’re not going anywhere; but if you’re driving in the wrong direction, you’re still not going to get there.
When you think about "quality" as more than just a technical metric, it becomes clear why it's such a critical and complex challenge for software teams.
High-quality code isn't just about preventing bugs, ensuring scalability, or adhering to best coding practices—it’s also about whether the software delivers real value to users and aligns with the company’s strategic goals.
How tricky is this challenge? Recently, Jon and I spoke with the Head of Engineering at a company known for delivering a great product to thousands of users with high operational excellence. They deploy to production up to 150 times a day while keeping process waste to a minimum. When we asked, "What’s your biggest challenge in delivery right now?" his response was straightforward: "How are we doing regarding quality? Interestingly, when I spoke to ten different executives and managers, I got ten different answers to the same question—each with their own definition and benchmark of quality.”
But here’s the thing: even senior leaders from less advanced companies express similar concerns about delivery challenges. Does this present a great opportunity? Perhaps operational excellence isn’t the first thing to focus on. Instead, could aligning quality with user value and company goals drive more impactful improvements?
When we asked what makes a good developer experience and mapped it against the DevEx drivers we use in our surveys, it was surprising to see the majority of responses focus on collaboration—especially cross-team collaboration—and planning & clarity, such as specification and priorities. These are non-technical issues, yet they emerged as key drivers of a positive DevEx. Among the technical concerns, technical debt ranked the highest.
In the context of the previous responses, for many teams, quality may mean building software that solves the right problems. Code can be technically flawless, but if it doesn’t address user needs or help advance the company’s objectives, it misses the mark. Quality, in this broader sense, is about ensuring that what’s being built not only works well but also has a meaningful impact on both users and the business.
Achieving this view of quality requires developers to be closely aligned with product and business teams. They need to understand not just the “how” of building software, but also the “why” behind it. This shifts the conversation from a purely technical focus to one where developers, product managers, and business leaders collaborate to deliver value that resonates with users while supporting broader company goals.
Next, we asked: What’s the main blocker to making improvements? A striking 64% of responses pointed to lack of capacity as the top issue, with data, alignment, and tools being much smaller concerns.
This highlights a kind of vicious cycle. If quality is the key challenge in software development, and we understand quality as not just a technical issue but also about delivering value, with clarity and collaboration as key drivers in delivery, then the lack of time to improve these areas becomes a serious problem. Without the capacity to focus on these improvements, teams can get stuck in a loop of unresolved challenges, hindering long-term success.
My team and I have been measuring collaboration for years, deeply analyzing anonymized collaboration metadata from meetings, emails, and chats with our Work Smart AI. What have we discovered across 100 million working hours, 2 billion interactions, and over 100 engineered metrics describing collaboration, deep work, meetings, and context switching? Teams' deep work capacity and collaboration patterns have a profound impact on productivity.
Not only do we see this impact, but deep work and cross-team collaboration are also key drivers in the Developer Experience Index (DXI)—the single number you need to improve ROI per engineer, according to the DX team.
What’s more, Deep Work and Collaboration aren’t just critical for ROI—they also enable other improvements in the Developer Experience [DevEx] space, fostering an environment where engineers can thrive and contribute more effectively.
How does your company improve developer experience to boost software delivery? Is it bottom-up (developer-driven), top-down (leadership-led), or collaborative (team and cross-functional, like a DevEx team)? The majority of responses leaned toward the collaborative approach.
While many improvements can be driven from the bottom up, cross-team accountability for Developer Experience (through a dedicated DevEx team or individual contributor focused on DevEx) seems crucial for elevating issues that require senior executive attention.
This might be the perfect time to revisit the core challenge in delivery: quality—understood more broadly than just technicalities—and the key DevEx drivers of clarity and collaboration.
What are your priorities for improving developer experience and delivery this year? According to our poll, 45% of respondents plan to increase their efforts in this area, showing a focus on making DevEx a priority for driving better software outcomes.
If you’d like to dive deeper into the discussion, you can check out the webinar recording and review the detailed notes here.
