One of the best things about DX is that it replaces assumptions with a clear, data-driven understanding of developer experience. Instead of relying on intuition and assumptions, DX gives us measurable, comparable insights into where friction actually exists, whether it's in tooling, documentation, cross-team collaboration, or pipelines and delivery flows. It provides concrete data to validate whether our initiatives are truly moving the needle for product teams, giving us a much stronger foundation for prioritizing work and aligning improvements with real team needs. As a platform domain, DX is especially valuable because it highlights where we can have the greatest positive impact across the organisation. When DX shows that certain issues (e.g., poor documentation quality) are common across the organisation, it helps us prioritise systemic improvements rather than local optimisations. It essentially gives us a shared compass for where our work will deliver the most value. In short, DX helps ensure developer time is spent where it creates the most value, and that our technical decisions are backed by evidence rather than opinion.

As a platform leader overseeing 10+ products and delivery teams, DX is a critical lever for identifying bottlenecks, friction points, and opportunities to improve the developer experience. DX insights help us move beyond what is happening to understand the why behind productivity challenges, enabling more informed, data-driven decisions. By survey feedback (run biannually), we can continuously track developer satisfaction, delivery health, and operational effectiveness. Integration with Jira and GitHub data, helps build metrics such as cycle time by project/team/individual, epic forecast accuracy, support tickets per customer, after-hours activity, and AI coding assistant adoption—allowing us to benchmark against industry standards, improve engineering quality, and ultimately deliver better customer outcomes.

What really stands out to me is that it’s built with empathy for engineers. It doesn’t try to micromanage individuals; it helps teams spot friction, improve flow, and have better conversations about what’s slowing them down. Used well, it becomes a shared language between engineering, leadership, and platform teams and that’s incredibly powerful.