Team Developer Experience — how it all started
How is it possible to build a DevOps culture for more than 200 developers? At SVT, our Developer Experience team plays a key role in achieving our DevOps vision.
We are made up of 5 human beings, not cats, with diverse backgrounds in development and operations and we are here to support a development organization of more than 30 autonomous product teams.
Our vision is that all developers at SVT are creative, innovative and happy. We achieve this by creating a DevOps culture at SVT and enabling our developers to do their work securely and without friction.
Since DevOps is a culture, it only works if it is lived by the whole organization. We couldn’t just be a team that “does DevOps” for everybody else. What we do is to enable our teams to work in a DevOps way by removing obstacles and sharing knowledge. That’s why we call ourselves DevOps Enablers. We take special care that we will never become a bottleneck for development teams: Every team needs to know and own their processes and solutions to stay productive.
For us, Developer Experience consists of two areas:
Facilitation & knowledge sharing includes educational initiatives, like workshops and documentation about techno-philosophical topics like automation and observability as well as helping out teams that are blocked by any kind of issues with their self-service environment. But this also includes DevOps evangelism towards the whole organisation.
Co-creating our development platform is the other side of our work. Together with the Webcore Infrastructure team, we provide a standardised hosting and development platform. While Webcore Infrastructure are specialized in providing our Kubernetes-based container hosting platform Aurora, we at Developer Experience provide a documentation platform and integrate with public cloud providers, amongst other things. Together, we drive the work on a Platform and hosting strategy for our development organization.
Communication is the most important tool in our box. Our goal is to make ourselves as approachable as possible. We make silly presentations, unsolicited use of memes and cat pictures, we sign our emails with “Peace” and we are as nice as we can be when interacting with our developers. We don’t pretend to know everything that people ask us about and we are trying to make everybody comfortable to ask even simple questions, even if that means that we are pasting the same documentation URL for the hundredth time. That way, it just so happens, that knowledge accumulates in our chat channel. Often our users answer each other’s questions.
So how are we doing? While there is always room for improvement, we would say we are doing great. We feel humbled and rewarded by the feedback from our users, which makes us feel that we are doing a meaningful job.
In our position, initiatives can take time and progress is not always apparent immediately. But if we take the time to stop along the way to look back, we can see just how far we have come.
It feels like we have always had our Developer Experience team. But we have only been around for five years. So how did it all start?
It starts with another team. The Webcore Infrastructure team was created at the end of 2015. It was assembled as a mix of competences from two departments at SVT with different backgrounds and with a mission to build a development platform for our development teams. Our at the time 12 development teams had been well on their journey of microservices adoption and were ready to level up their container orchestration game.
We introduced and iterated over our container hosting platform and developer feedback was good. However, the responsibilities of the team grew too broad with time. Ownership and on-call for the hosting platform together with development workflows and facilitation became a tough balance to strike. Some things were always left on the wayside and those things were usually the development workflow improvements. The priority of improving our production infrastructure could never be competed with.
This situation was not sustainable. Since we didn’t have the possibility to grow the team, this remained a prioritisation problem. So we asked ourselves: Could we solve this by dedicating time for developer productivity improvements? Why not break out two Webcore Infrastructure team members into a small new team dedicated to facilitation and knowledge sharing and to improving the Developer Experience?
The support of our development manager Hilda was especially crucial for the team in this situation. Together we pitched the concept to our development organisation — and got immediate positive feedback. We defined our new mission and formed the new team. Besides helping the teams to improve their Continuous Delivery automation, we found we had a lot of low-hanging fruit to pluck. And the rest is history…
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So are we done by now? Have we achieved our vision of supremely creative, happy and innovative developers? Of course not. But we are a lot closer now that we were five years ago. So we are on the right track.
What are the next big steps then for the Developer Experience team? Apart from all the latest Kubernetes, GitLab and Docusaurus fun stuff that we immerse ourselves in every day, we have been thinking extra hard about user feedback.
Feedback is obviously vital to us. After all, our mission is to fulfil the needs of our development teams in a sustainable way. In the past we have mainly relied on surveys we sent out to our users. But we feel that we need a way of collecting feedback that helps us build better relationships with our users and that gives us deeper insights into their needs, especially in times of constantly working remotely. We are just about getting ready to experiment with conducting regular interviews with our users for qualitative feedback.
Our organisation is continuously growing and maturing and so are we. After all, the needs of our users are constantly evolving. One thing, however, will never change: Our teams will always be able to rely on us to come up with new ways to develop our DevOps culture.
Alexander Bethke, Product Owner in the Webcore Developer Experience team
Hilda Stenberg, Development Manager Webcore
