Nicole Forsgren

AI tools shift the primary developer activity from creation to review, fundamentally changing the cognitive load and mental models required for the job.

"People really fundamentally shift the way they work when they work with an AI-enabled tool... you spend more time reviewing code than writing code... we've changed what your mental model is. So we've..."

AI accelerates the strategy-to-execution loop by enabling rapid prototyping and faster customer experimentation.

"I think there are a lot of ways that we can pull in AI tools to help us refine our strategy, refine our message, think about the experimentation methods or targets of experimentation... because now, t..."

Building with LLMs shifts the developer's role from primary author to critical reviewer, requiring rigorous evaluation of non-deterministic output.

"We can't just put in a command and guess something back and accept it. We really need to evaluate it. Are we seeing hallucinations? What's the reliability? Does it meet the style that we would typical..."

Advanced AI workflows involve systematic upfront planning and the use of parallel agents rather than simple line-by-line prompting.

"Many times I'll see them say, to help prime it, 'This is what I want to build. It needs to have these basic architectural components. It needs to have this kind of a stack. It needs to follow this gen..."

Organizational initiatives like improving developer experience require simultaneous buy-in from both leadership and individual contributors.

"Not pursuing this in both a top-down and a bottom-up structure, right. And I think that can really help drive success, and having good communication throughout is super, super important, right. So get..."

To gain alignment for internal initiatives, frame the benefits using the specific business metrics and language that leadership prioritizes.

"In part, it depends on what your leadership chain really cares about... If they've been talking about market share? Losing market share or competitiveness in the marketplace, if that's it, focus on sp..."

Engineering excellence is a result of integrated technical, architectural, and cultural capabilities rather than just implementing specific tools.

"DevOps is not a toolchain you buy. Marketing teams labeled toolchains DevOps because they wanted your money. DevOps is a set of capabilities. They're technical capabilities. They're architectural capa..."

Developer Experience (DevEx) is the foundational layer of engineering performance, focusing on daily workflows, friction, and support systems.

"DevEx is developer experience. And when we think about developer experience, we're really talking about what it's like to build software, day to day, for a developer. So the friction that they face, t..."

The three pillars of a high-performing developer experience are flow state, manageable cognitive load, and fast feedback loops.

"One way to talk about it is kind of three key things that have components that are important of themselves, and they also kind of reinforce each other. Flow state is one of them, cognitive load is ano..."

The 'Four-Box Framework' helps clarify hypotheses by forcing you to define conceptual relationships in words before selecting data proxies.

"Draw four boxes on a piece of paper... the first two to the left of them write the word words. And below them, write the word data... always start with words. You do not start with data. You always st..."

Effective decision-making requires explicitly defining and weighting evaluation criteria to move from 'gut feel' to data-informed choices.

"It comes down to really clearly defining what your criteria is. What's important, and then among that criteria what's most important... identify the criteria that are most important to you... for each..."

Most teams fail because they do not spend enough time being 'crisp' on the specific problem or goal they are trying to solve.

"Starting with what is your problem or what is your goal? I would say this is a bigger challenge than most people recognize or realize. 80% of the folks that I work with, this is their biggest problem...."

Effective developer surveys should force prioritization and measure the frequency of friction to provide clear signals for improvement.

"You can just ask a few questions, 'How satisfied are you? What are the biggest barriers to your productivity, or what are the biggest challenges to getting work done?' and let them pick either from a..."

Avoid 'double-barreled' questions in surveys to ensure the data collected is specific and actionable.

"A lot of folks go to write a survey question and they'll say something like, 'Were the build and test system slow or complicated in the last week?' You're asking four different questions there. If som..."

System telemetry often misses the 'human cost' or 'heroics' required to maintain performance, making qualitative feedback essential.

"Data from people and data from systems are really important compliments because we can get certain insights from people that we'll never get from systems. Let's look at lead time from changes, for exa..."

Contrary to common belief, increasing shipping speed actually improves system stability by reducing the size and complexity of each change.

"Speed and stability move together. Most people only think about this from the speed standpoint, which means when you move faster, you are more stable, which means you're pushing smaller changes more o..."

Speed of shipping is only valuable when coupled with a strong product strategy that ensures the right things are being built.

"Most teams can move faster. But faster for what? We can ship trash faster every single day. We need strategy and really smart decisions to know what to ship, what to experiment with, what features we..."