Building Developer Experience - Brick by Brick

High autonomy led to cognitive overload for 1200 engineers. See how The LEGO Group built a developer portal to fix it, brick by brick.

#1about 3 minutes

Building a digital organization in a legacy company

The LEGO Group established a 1200-engineer digital unit with product teams and a DevOps model to build modern digital experiences.

#2about 5 minutes

Identifying key developer experience pain points

An annual "Voice of the Developer" survey revealed high cognitive load and difficulties with documentation and code reusability despite good autonomy.

#3about 1 minute

Focusing on discoverability, documentation, and communication

To address developer pain points, the DX team focused its investment on three core pillars: discoverability, documentation, and communication.

#4about 10 minutes

Implementing a developer portal with Spotify Backstage

LEGO built "Baseplate," a customized Spotify Backstage portal, to centralize information about products, APIs, documentation, and engineering tools.

#5about 1 minute

Investing in better documentation writing and training

To improve documentation quality and consumption, the team invested in training engineers and bringing in technical writers for inspiration.

#6about 3 minutes

Fostering community with events and communication channels

A curated newsletter, community events, bi-annual dev fairs, and an internal developer conference help build community and share knowledge.

#7about 4 minutes

Exploring AI, developer metrics, and inner sourcing

Future developer experience efforts will focus on deliberately adopting AI, using developer metrics for improvement, and scaling an inner sourcing culture.

From learning to earning

Jobs that call for the skills explored in this talk.