Driving Developer Advocacy and Satisfaction: Developer Experience Initiatives Need Developer Advocacy to Be Successful

Editor's Note: The following is an article written for and published in DZone's 2025 Trend Report, Developer Experience: The Coalescence of Developer Productivity, Process Satisfaction, and Platform Engineering.

Developer experience has become a topic of interest in organizations over the last few years. In general, it is always nice to know that organizations are worrying about the experience of their employees, but in a market economy, there is probably more to it than just the goodwill of the C-suite. If we take a step back and consider that many organizations have come to terms with the importance of software for their business' success, it is clear that developers are critical employees not just for software companies but for every organization. It is as Satya Nadella famously stated:

"Every company is now a software company."

Improving the developer experience is then, as a result, making sure that the experience for developers is one that makes it easy to be productive and leaves the developer satisfied. There is a virtuous cycle between the ability to be productive, solve business problems, and derive satisfaction from a job well done. This is why so many organizations introduced developer experience initiatives, or "ways of working" workgroups, to fuel that virtuous cycle.

There is a second consideration for developer experience: the world of technology has become faster and more complex. Where we had dozens of components that were released into production each quarter, we are now delivering hundreds or thousands of microservices multiple times per day. To make this possible, we have toolchains that can look as complex as the enterprise technology architecture, with dozens of products supporting every aspect of the technology delivery lifecycle.

Developers, as a result, are often tasked with navigating the tooling landscape and the delivery processes that have evolved at the same speed as the enterprise tooling, leading to additional handovers, unnecessary system interactions, and wait cycles. This "toil" is not only reducing productivity, but it also impacts the satisfaction of the developer. One antidote to this is developer advocacy, which can be defined as a dedicated effort to channel the needs of developers to the right places in the organization to improve the developer experience.

One last thing to touch on before diving into how to support developer advocacy in your organization is the rise of interest in development platforms. There are different names being used to describe similar concepts: platform engineering, internal developer platform, or engineering system. Combining developer advocacy with the implementation of such a platform provides a very concrete expression of aspects of the developer experience and can provide tangible measurements that can inform your advocacy efforts.

Benefits of Developer Advocacy Lead to Improved Developer Experience

Let's talk about benefits where it matters most: with your customers. To bring to life the quote about every company being a software company, imagine how customers experience your organization. Nowadays, that is most often through technology, which can take many forms:

• Most bank transactions are not actions in a physical branch with a person, but rather through mobile or internet banking.
• Tesla customers often consider the regular feature update as the most meaningful engagement with the Tesla company.
• Even retail shopping is now a technology experience either through self-checkout terminals, direct-toconsumer sales channels online, or large technology marketplaces like Google, Amazon, or Facebook.

The people in your organization who shape those interactions are the developers. Bringing the developers closer to the customer, allowing them to focus on solving customer problems, and delighting them with good customer experiences are actions that drive revenue and profits for organizations.

While this benefit is the most important, it is, however, also relatively hard to measure. Productivity measurements have been traditionally difficult to achieve in software development — attempts with function points, story points, or misguided attempts with lines of code have all been mostly abandoned. What we can measure, however, is the opposite of productivity: toil.

Toil takes many forms and can be measured in many cases. Reasonable measures include:

• Cycle time for processes
• Number of handovers
• Number of systems one needs to engage with to achieve a certain technology process
• Rework
• And many others

These measures can be modeled into financial benefits (such as reduction of cost) where necessary, or can just be used to guide the developer's advocacy efforts with a developer experience scorecard as seen in Figure 1.

Figure 1. Developer experience scorecard

There are other less measurable benefits that may be introduced through developer advocacy as well. Some of the challenges for developers may come from a sub-optimal architecture, which reduces the efficiency of getting things done. It is very likely that the same architectural challenges also affect the customer or your resiliency.

Addressing this may uplift more than just the developer experience. The same is true for the process improvements driven by your developers, which may free up stakeholders in those processes to do other things as well as create an overall positive shift in the organizational culture.

Culture in an organization, after all, is enacted through actions, and making those actions more positive and meaningful will positively influence the culture.

Lastly, improving the developer experience goes hand in hand with an improvement of DevSecOps practices; this improves productivity, as highlighted above, but also improves your security posture and operational reliability, which in turn, improves the customer experience. This is another virtuous cycle we want to leverage.

Figure 2. Developer experience virtuous cycle

What Developer Advocacy Means in Practice

Developer advocacy programs should cover four different areas that reinforce each other: engineering processes, engineering culture and career models, developer platforms and tools, and creating communities.

Engineering Processes

For developer advocacy to be a win-win for organizations and individuals, it has to find a way to make the right things easy to do. Improving efficiency opens up cost reductions and makes the employee more satisfied, and this requires process redesign work. Luckily, developers know how to improve algorithms, and deploying this skill to overall engineering processes can be a successful way to engage developers in redesigning the software engineering processes of an organization.

Engineering Culture and Career Models

Companies that now rely on software to be successful don't always have an engineering culture that supports the creative nature of software development. This is most clearly visible when there is no career model for people to progress outside of traditional people and business management. Progressing along technical excellence pathways requires new ways of evaluating performance and rewarding individuals.

Developer Platforms and Tools

Engineers gravitate to new tools, and while this should not be the sole focus of developer advocacy, supporting the improvements with the right tools and an intuitive developer platform goes a long way. Backstage is a popular open-source architecture for such a developer platform. The recent trend in popularity of topics related to platform engineering shows that the industry is investing in finding better ways to solve this.

Creating Communities

Advocacy requires support from the intended audience, which means developer advocacy needs to win the hearts and minds of the developers in the organization. One of the best ways to do this is to create a purpose broader than just the organization.

We see this successfully at community events like devopsdays, Agile conferences, or technology conferences where people share their problems and solution approaches to further the engineering "craft."

Figure 3. The pillars of developer advocacy

Unfortunately, the implementation of each developer advocacy program differs as each company, their processes, and their technology are different. Therefore, it is important to use feedback loops to find out what works and what doesn't work.

You can leverage the measures of the scorecard and/or direct feedback from the developer community to inform the next iterative evolution of your program. Don't just follow what other companies do; let yourself be inspired by them and chart your own course instead.

Challenges for Developer Advocacy

There are challenges for successful developer advocacy programs. The first one is the diversity of the audience: You likely deal with junior developers and veterans alike, developers working with technologies ranging from modern microservices over packaged software all the way to heritage mainframe software, and stakeholders who are either intimate with technology or have never written a line of code.

Bringing all these people together requires building community, focusing on objective outcomes, and making advocacy an inclusive endeavor. Developer advocacy is not something that can be driven top-down; rather, it needs to be rooted in the community.

Once you have the developer community in the organization behind you, you need to also have something in it for the executive ranks who need to keep funding this work. This ideally means finding tangible financial benefits in either cost reduction or increasing revenue; if that is not possible, an alternative is to at least show measurable positive customer impact. Following the earlier advice of making progress measurable will go a long way in keeping all stakeholders supportive.

Conclusion

From our discussion, it is clear that improving the developer experience and satisfaction should be at the top of technology executives' minds. One of the best ways to do that is by having a developer advocacy program that combines the soft aspects like developer career paths and encouraging an engineering culture with hard technology solutions like building a developer platform that makes engineering tasks easier to achieve. To keep the executive ranks supportive of your developer advocacy program, it is important to keep measuring progress and to be able to translate that progress into business measures, as we described in this article.

Last but not least — this should be a little fun, too — give your developer platform an interesting name, create some gamification elements to encourage positive behavior, and build a community that cares for each other. Happy employees often create the best results, after all!

This is an excerpt from DZone's 2025 Trend Report, Developer Experience: The Coalescence of Developer Productivity, Process Satisfaction, and Platform Engineering. 

Read the Free Report