As product managers, we’re obsessed with external metrics: NPS, MAU, LTV, you name it. We build entire roadmaps around improving the customer experience. But what about the experience of our internal customers—the engineers who actually build the product?
There’s a growing conversation around Developer Experience (DevEx), and it’s time PMs started paying serious attention. Every minute an engineer spends fighting a clunky CI/CD pipeline, deciphering poor documentation, or waiting for a test environment is a minute they aren’t shipping value to users. Poor DevEx isn’t just an ‘engineering problem’; it’s a product velocity problem, a quality problem, and a retention problem.
Great products are built by happy, productive teams. Treating your internal platforms, tools, and workflows as a ‘product’ with your developers as the ‘users’ is a powerful mindset shift. Running discovery, gathering feedback, and iterating on your internal toolchain can have an outsized impact on your ability to innovate. Understanding this internal feedback loop is key. At Leera, we’ve seen how surfacing friction points from tools like Jira can pinpoint exactly where the development workflow is breaking down, allowing teams to address the root cause.
Your team’s momentum is your greatest asset. If you aren’t actively investing in making their work life smoother, you’re accumulating organizational debt that will eventually cripple your roadmap.
So, here’s my question for you all: How involved are product managers in your organization with the developer experience, and do you treat internal platforms as a product?