When you first start off with an engineering team at a small company, everybody is in the same room, and you can just ask developers what their problems are. As a company grows, it becomes harder and harder to be sure you’re building the right infrastructure for your developers. Eventually, understanding the problems to solve and prioritizing them appropriately becomes the most important part of successfully improving developer productivity.

In this talk, I will go over what we have done at LinkedIn to understand our developers, how we go about defining metrics and feedback systems for them, and what we have done to make that data actionable for our tool and infrastructure owners.