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Dogfooding developer products: gathering insights from internal hackathons
Josh Brown shares Spotify’s experience of using internal hackathons to learn about the APIs they’ve developed, in this talk from DevRelCon London 2019.
Video
- Stay out of the way during hack week.
- Hackers are eager to dive into products!
- Learn as much as possible from the developer experience of hack teams that were building on our API and SDK products during Hack Week, of which there were many.
- Studying DX from employed developers can be tough.
- Avoid collecting feedback on your entire platform.
- Be super aware of which resources your internal developers use when they build their hacks.
- Take some time at the end of your internal hackathon to interview developers.
- One was to stay out of the way during hack week.
- Learn as much as possible from the developer experience of hack teams that were building on our API and SDK products during Hack Week, of which there were many.
- They are very different from external developers who use your SDK or API and
- They often bring background knowledge about a product that an external developer would not have access to.
- Avoid collecting feedback on your entire platform.
- Pick really specific topics that I wanted to study and do a deep dive on those.
- Focusing on a small area can make it actionable for the product team.
- Be super aware of which resources your internal developers use when they build their hacks.
- Employees at a company tend to have extra access to resources like log files, source code, and other developers who may have worked on the developer tools that they’re going to use.
- When hack teams’ internal hack teams stray away from using your public documentation, that decision can be really insightful and could indicate a gap or problem with what’s publicly available on your website for developers.
- Take some time at the end of your internal hackathon to interview developers.
- One-on-one about their experience with your chosen process or product area.
- It helps to bring pre-planned questions and to be really specific in these interviews.
- As part of the interview, it’s also really important to take time to understand their day job, the team that they worked with on their hack,
- The project goals of the hack
- This context really helps place the feedback, makes it actionable and gives you context that can help turn that into something you could bring back to your product team.