Developer Experience

When building for developers, many of us start by scratching our own itches. That’s great for pulling together an MVP — and doing some interesting engineering along the way — but it’s all too easy to get wrapped up in the functionality of the thing and lose sight of what it’s like to be on the other side of your API.

To prevent your shiny new tool from being reduced to just a set of inputs and outputs, Christine explores best practices worth baking into your team’s culture — and how to carry those principles through growth and change.

In this panel, Opsee’s cofounder and cohost of popular DX podcast Don’t Make me Code, Steve Boak interviews folks from Twilio, Pantheon and Convox on what it’s like to run an efficient product discovery process including research and survey techniques, user feedback loops, and challenges in defining new features.

For more than 30 years, command line interfaces have been designed using classic Unix-based best practices. While those practices remain foundational, the realities of building and implementing modern cloud-native applications has broadened the scope of how developers interact with your CLI.

In this presentation, CoreOS Head of UX Rob Szumski discusses how his team treats CLIs like APIs including their tactics for better user experience, backwards compatibility and future-proofing.

No matter how great your developer product may be, when you forget your documentation, you’ll run into problems.

UX practitioner Nick Cawthon discusses how industry leading developer companies attempt to build a centralized source of product truth, common (and unexpected) documentation entry points, and metrics to ensure you’re building documentation that scales over time.

Developer company founders are in a unique position. They start with an MVP and a strong product design approach, build on their early community adoption, and continue to iterate even as the product continues to gain traction.

Where do you go after you’ve implemented everything in your V1 Product Roadmap? How does your design philosophy change as you scale to millions of users? And how much control do you offer the community in your product direction?

The founders of PagerDuty, HashiCorp and Meteor offer their early design assumptions, show how their products have scaled over time, and debate the merits of product auteurs vs. design-by-community.