For the last month I have been running a program for CTOs and VPs of small to mid-size companies to help them make their engineering teams ship faster.
It’s an 8-week program that blends live teaching and group coaching, and it’s for small groups: only 10 seats. You can reply to this email if you are interested in the next cohort in Q2!
Why am I saying this now? Because today’s topic is inspired by the last session of the program, which was about developer experience.
For some, this will be surprising. Most of the content you can find online these days is about AI, and it seems like learning to use AI well is the most promising route to shipping faster and more often.
But I am going to spill a secret here. AI is not that hard to use 🤷♂️
Yeah that’s right. Some people will convince you there is a whole new world to learn about agents, skills, tools, and while it is true that you need to get yourself somewhat comfortable with these, we are engineers, dammit! It’s all kinda easy to wrap our heads around.
So if you look at real teams — not solo engineers, I mean real engineering teams — that are getting the most out of AI, it’s most often not because they are using AI better or differently than the rest of us. It’s because they use AI on top of a platform that is already good. Folks were already productive and efficient before AI, and they got even more so now.
AI benefits teams who have their house in order, which largely means: good developer experience.
So, today we explore a simple but powerful technique to diagnose your devex: the Listening Tour. It’s a structured way to surface friction by talking to your engineers and mapping what you learn to your dev process.
Here is the agenda:
🧱 What is developer experience — and why friction is the enemy.
🔍 Interview your engineers — run a listening tour to collect stories of friction.
🗺️ Map friction to your process — group problems by dev pipeline step.
🧮 Score by reach and impact — prioritize without overthinking.
🔬 Find the one bottleneck — and why improving the wrong step makes things worse.
Let’s dive in!