Connecting DevEx Delivery to Developer Needs
About how we re-established continuous discovery through 27 general developer interviews and approximately 6–7 AI-focused interviews.
The Client: A Global Visual Collaboration Software Company
The client provides enterprise collaboration software with over 100 million total users and approximately 4 million paying users worldwide. Its internal Developer Experience tooling serves around 600 engineers across Frontend and Backend development. Its internal Developer Experience tooling serves around 600 engineers working across front-end and back-end development.
The product area covered two senior engineering teams and approximately 13 concurrent initiatives. Each initiative needed clear value, adoption, documentation, stakeholder alignment, and measurable impact.
The Mission: Connecting Developer Experience Delivery to User Needs
Background
Product People joined for four months as maternity cover for the Lead Product Manager responsible for front-end and back-end Developer Experience. The engagement maintained delivery momentum while introducing stronger prioritization, continuous discovery, value framing, and stakeholder communication.
Product People worked alongside senior engineers across discovery, initiative shaping, cycle planning, adoption, strategic alignment, and handover.
Why Product People Were Needed
The broad scope, autonomous teams, and dependencies across Infrastructure required product leadership that could add clarity without introducing unnecessary process.
- Prioritization tied to developer needs and impact
- Clear ownership across teams and initiatives
- Continuous discovery across front-end and back-end developers
- Transparent communication of progress and tradeoffs
Our Main Quest: Aligning Developer Experience Investment With User Needs
Creating Clear Priorities Across Teams
Problem: The back-end Developer Experience team had become the fallback for unowned work, while front-end Developer Experience team’s capacity was constrained by support responsibilities, organizational changes, and a parallel AI initiative. Unclear ownership and resistance to slicing made tradeoffs and milestone planning harder.
What We Did:
- Increased team focus through lightweight prioritization, betting tables, initiative shapes, and business-value framing.
- Improved accountability through decision logs and clearer cross-team ownership.
- Increased stakeholder visibility through cycle kickoff, progress, and wrap-up communications.
Outcome: Both teams completed strategic goal-setting workshops. Feedback after the first planning cycles was very positive, with engineers reporting greater focus.
Replacing Assumptions With Developer Evidence
Problem: Developer research had not continued after a limited interview cycle. Prioritization therefore relied heavily on perceived needs rather than a repeatable combination of user insights, data, incident analysis, and team input.
What We Did:
- Re-established continuous discovery through ~40 developer interviews across three months.
- Cross-referenced interview findings with survey data, product analytics, and incident analysis.
- Conducted workshops with Backend and Front-end Developer Experience teams to map blockers and leavers against each user problem area.
- Converted evidence into strategic goals, prioritized roadmaps, summary decks, and recorded presentations.
Outcome: Front-end and back-end Developer Experience teams aligned their goals around documented developer problems, creating an evidence-based foundation for half-yearly planning.
Side Quests
- Created a structured adoption path for sandboxed development environments by mapping current use cases, completing a solution review, and preparing an initial launch.
- Completed the first phase of a modular architecture initiative and reframed its second phase around user value, modularity metrics, and runtime dependency analysis.
- Quantified code-review friction: median first reaction was approximately 1.4 hours, P90 reached 43 hours, and around 1,375 pull requests were waiting.
🏆 Mission Achievements: Delivered Outcomes
✅ Rebuilt discovery evidence – Completed more than 35 general and AI-focused developer interviews to guide Developer Experience priorities.
✅ Aligned strategic goals – Brought front-end, back-end, and Infrastructure leadership around evidence-backed priorities.
✅ Earned champion confidence – The client champion closed the engagement by confirming they would work with Product People again.
In the Client’s Own Words
Space Crew of this Mission
For Clients: When to Hire Us
You can hire us as an Interim/Freelance Product Manager or Product Owner
It takes, on average, three to nine months to find the right Product Manager to hire as a full-time employee. In the meantime, someone needs to fill in the void: drive cross-functional initiatives, decide what is worth building, and help the development team deliver the best outcomes.
If you're looking for a great Product Manager / Product Owner to join your team ASAP, Product People is a good plug-and-play solution to bridge the gap.
Interested in working with us?
Our Interim/Fractional Product Managers, Owners, and Leaders quickly fill gaps, scale your team, or lead key initiatives during transitions. We onboard swiftly, align teams, and deliver results.