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Nicole Forsgren

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2025-10-19
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2025-10-19
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  1. “So, online, you can find the book at developerexperiencebook.com. I'm at 1.fv.com and LinkedIn. Occasionally sometimes it's a mess. I try to wave through all of the noise I get there to be useful. Sign up for the book and the workbooks. The workbooks are free. I'd love to get, you know, any kind of feedback on what works, what doesn't I always love hearing those kind of stories.”

    2025-10-19 · Lenny's Podcast · How to measure AI developer productivity in 2025 | Nicole Forsgren · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  2. “Sure. So I am senior director of developer intelligence in core developer. So it's super exciting, super fun because of all of these things we've been talking about, right? It's like focused on Google and all their properties and their kind of underlying infrastructure. How can we improve developer experience, developer productivity, velocity, all of these things we've been talking about? And because I'm kind of the numbers person, right? How do we want to think about measuring it? How does measurement change? How do feedback loops change? How can we improve the experience throughout and then kind of drive that change through an organization in ways that are meaningful and impactful and faster than they've been before?”

    2025-10-19 · Lenny's Podcast · How to measure AI developer productivity in 2025 | Nicole Forsgren · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  3. “Yeah, I think one that's come up a couple times. It's not like a verbatim thing. I think it's more the vibe, but like hindsight is 2020, but it's also really dumb, right? I think if we made the best decision we could at the time with the information that we had available, like that it is what it is, right? If you make a bad decision because you made a bad decision and you knew better and you had the information, not great, but. I don't think we give ourselves or other people enough grace because we always end up finding more information out later.”

    2025-10-19 · Lenny's Podcast · How to measure AI developer productivity in 2025 | Nicole Forsgren · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  4. “Which is delicious. The one is a Jura coffee maker. I'd love good coffee and I'm not great at making it, so I can just push the button and it'll give me anything I want, including like lattes, cappuccinos, or anything. So that's kind of fun.”

    2025-10-19 · Lenny's Podcast · How to measure AI developer productivity in 2025 | Nicole Forsgren · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  5. “A random one. I will say, I love how big things get done. I can't pronounce the name. I think one's Scandinavian one is, but it kind of dissects really large projects through recent-ish history and where they failed and why. And I think it's really interesting for us to think about, especially now in this AI moment where basically all of our at least software systems are going to be changing. So how do we think about approaching what is essentially going to be a very large project? And then, sorry, I'm going to throw on a bonus one, the undoing project by Michael Lewis. Matt Velosa recommended it to me and it's so good.”

    2025-10-19 · Lenny's Podcast · How to measure AI developer productivity in 2025 | Nicole Forsgren · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  6. “Outlive by Peter Atia is fantastic. Another one that's, I guess, maybe related, I hurt my back. So it's not great. Back mechanic by Stuart Miguel is incredible. So shout out to anyone who has hurt lower back. It's for a layperson to read through and like figure out how to fix lower back bums.”

    2025-10-19 · Lenny's Podcast · How to measure AI developer productivity in 2025 | Nicole Forsgren · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  7. “I've been impressed a couple times. I mean, definitely the machines are listening to us. It's given me a mock up of a room or something, and then it throws in a dog bed. I have dogs. And I'm like, I did not tell you to do that. But yeah, that's probably the color and style of dog bed that I should have this room.”

    2025-10-19 · Lenny's Podcast · How to measure AI developer productivity in 2025 | Nicole Forsgren · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  8. “So Have been kind of working on some home design and like redecorating rooms and stuff. I'm working with a designer because I know what I like, but I don't know how to get there. I'm not good at this. But I've really been loving. ChatGPT and Gemini especially to render pictures for me, right? So I can give it the floor plan. I can give it one shot of the room that's like definitely not what it's supposed to look like. And then I can give it pictures of a couple different things. And I can just tell it change the walls or change the furniture layout or change something. And it helps me, and it's relatively quick. It helps me kind of visualize the things again. I know what I like, but I don't know how to get there. So I know if I like it or not. Which is probably a very random use, but it's fun for now”

    2025-10-19 · Lenny's Podcast · How to measure AI developer productivity in 2025 | Nicole Forsgren · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  9. “We're using AI tools. We're embedding AI into our products. Things are changing so rapidly that it can be really important to take like half a beat and say, okay, what's the problem? This metric that we've had for the last 10 years still important, or should this be sunset because it's not really important anymore. It's not driving the types of decisions and actions that I need.”

    2025-10-19 · Lenny's Podcast · How to measure AI developer productivity in 2025 | Nicole Forsgren · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  10. “Think something that's important to think about in general is to bring a product mindset to any type of DevX improvements that are happening and also the metrics that we kind of collect and capture. And by that I mean we want to identify a problem, right? Make sure we're solving a problem for a set of users. We want to think about creating MVPs and experiments and get fast feedback, you know, do some like rapid iteration. We want to have a strategy. We want to know who our addressable market is. We want to know what success is. We want to basically have a go-to-market function, right? We need to have comms. We need to get continuous feedback from our customers. We want to keep improving. And at some point, we want to think about sunsetting something, right? Is it a maintenance mode? Is it sunsetting? And I think that's important in general, but I think it's extra important now because when we have a”

    2025-10-19 · Lenny's Podcast · How to measure AI developer productivity in 2025 | Nicole Forsgren · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  11. “Of California, that was the best happy days. Make happy code. They write better programs. They do better work. They're better team members and collaborators. But capturing and trying to directly influence happiness, that's not what we're here for, right? And it's too challenging. It's too encompassing. Satisfaction can give us some signal.”

    2025-10-19 · Lenny's Podcast · How to measure AI developer productivity in 2025 | Nicole Forsgren · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  12. “I don't. No, I will. I will say I don't love happiness survey. Because there are too many things that contribute to happiness. Happiness is a lot, right? So happiness is work. Happiness is family. Happiness is hobbies. Happiness is weekends. Happiness, there's so many things that contribute to happiness. Now, that doesn't mean I don't care about happiness. I think happiness surveys are not particularly useful here. What can be helpful is satisfaction. And people are like, what's the same thing? It's not because you can ask, are you satisfied with this tool, right? And then ask some follow-up questions. Now, those two are related because the more satisfied you are with your job and your tools and the work and your team, it contributes to happiness. And I used to joke, remember, like golf commercials like happy cows make happy cheese.”

    2025-10-19 · Lenny's Podcast · How to measure AI developer productivity in 2025 | Nicole Forsgren · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  13. “Think about this. Example surveys, a lot of example questions we even recommend what the format, like what the flow should look like, how long it should be, how long it should not be.”

    2025-10-19 · Lenny's Podcast · How to measure AI developer productivity in 2025 | Nicole Forsgren · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  14. “Having a conversation with Claude or Gemini or ChatGPT around here are the survey questions, or can you propose them? And then make sure you take a couple rounds. Is this a good survey question? What questions can I answer? From the data that I get, what problems could I solve if you can't answer a question with data? Don't get it.”

    2025-10-19 · Lenny's Podcast · How to measure AI developer productivity in 2025 | Nicole Forsgren · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  15. “Enough, yeah. And I will say one thing that's challenging when you start, when you think about getting data, right? So interviews are data, and that's important. Surveys are a little more quantified, right? Because we can turn into counts. But that's where we also want to be careful, right? A lot of folks go to write a survey question and they'll say something like, were the build-in test system slow or complicated in the last week? You're asking four different questions there. If someone answers yes, was it the build? Was it the test? Was it slow or was it like flaky or complicated or something, right? So it can be really difficult to. Untangle what the signal is you're actually getting there. And so it is worth time chatting with someone who's familiar with survey design.”

    2025-10-19 · Lenny's Podcast · How to measure AI developer productivity in 2025 | Nicole Forsgren · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  16. “And then kind of open text, right? Like, is there anything else we should know? That can give you incredible signal. Because by making folks prioritize the top three things, let them pick everything. Like it makes the data super, super messy. But three things and how often you can just come up with a score or a weighted score if you want and then go kind of dig into where should that data be, what data do we need. But also then you've got at least some kind of baseline, right? It'll be a subjective baseline, but now you'll know what the biggest challenges are.”

    2025-10-19 · Lenny's Podcast · How to measure AI developer productivity in 2025 | Nicole Forsgren · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  17. “The metrics, and if you do already, it might not be what you think you want, right? Metrics that were designed without purpose, questionable, metrics that were designed for another purpose, they might work for what you want, but they might not. So we can't just assume we have them. So that's one reason I like surveys. We included an example in the book. You can just ask a few questions, right? 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 set of tools or maybe like a set of processes and then say like let them pick three just three of those three how often does this affect you right is this hourly is this daily is this weekly is this quarterly right because sometimes it hits you every single day and you're just mad about it sometimes it only hits you once a quarter because it's end of quarter but it's so onerous right”

    2025-10-19 · Lenny's Podcast · How to measure AI developer productivity in 2025 | Nicole Forsgren · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  18. “You're just starting today, and if you have nothing at all, talk to people obviously after that. I would do surveys because surveys can give you a nice kind of overall view of the landscape quickly so that you know where the big kind of challenges are. And I say that because if you're just starting, you might not have instrumentation through your system”

    2025-10-19 · Lenny's Podcast · How to measure AI developer productivity in 2025 | Nicole Forsgren · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  19. “Would say it's actually one of those, I would pick as broad a swath as you can. So if you can go from idea to customer or idea to experiment, how long does that take? How long does it typically take and how long can it take and does it take now with improved use of AI tooling and reduction in friction, right? And that's where I will say we talk about this a little bit in the book, you know, how do we deal with attribution challenges? So like what was responsible for this? Was it the DEFX or was it the AI? Go ahead and disclose that, right? Say, yes, we rolled out AI tools. We also had this effort in DevX. They partnered very closely together. Both of them probably contributed to this, right? Like if we had AI tools without the DevX improvements, we probably would have had some improvements, but not nearly as much.”

    2025-10-19 · Lenny's Podcast · How to measure AI developer productivity in 2025 | Nicole Forsgren · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  20. “I say also it depends because sometimes something they'll say something, right? Like leadership will say something and it kind of comes up as a theme. If you can solve a problem that they have or it's like something that they're focused on, if you can slightly reframe it even, right? Like if they're calling everything developer productivity, go ahead and call it productivity. If they're calling it velocity and velocity is what matters to them, think about how to frame this in terms of velocity. If they're talking about transformation or disruption, right? How does this help with the disruption? Because then it will resonate with them. We don't want to make them work to understand what it is. We're doing and the value that we provide.”

    2025-10-19 · Lenny's Podcast · How to measure AI developer productivity in 2025 | Nicole Forsgren · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  21. “Profit margin all the time, right? No, we always talk about money, right? Because this is business. But if that seems to be an overarching narrative, look for ways that you can save money and then translate that into recovered and recouped headcount cost, right? Or sometimes you'll kind of like reinvent, change the process, and then you no longer need as many vendors, right? So reductions in vendor spend can also help there.”

    2025-10-19 · Lenny's Podcast · How to measure AI developer productivity in 2025 | Nicole Forsgren · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  22. “Would say it depends. And in part, it depends on what your leadership chain really cares about, right? Like we're usually pretty good at figuring out what matters to developers and we could communicate that to them. But if we're trying to just identify two or three data points to really kind of focus on because when we're first starting with data, sometimes it can be challenging. Do they care about? Think about the messaging you've been hearing. Have they been talking about market share, right? Losing market share or competitiveness in the marketplace. If that's it, focus on speed. Think about ways that you can capture metrics for speed from like feature to production or feature to customer or feature to experiment and what that feedback loop looks like. If they're talking about”

    2025-10-19 · Lenny's Podcast · How to measure AI developer productivity in 2025 | Nicole Forsgren · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  23. “More reliable systems, right? There's less toil because they don't have to keep rerunning tests or kind of go clean up test suites. From the business perspective, cleaning up a test at a build suite can be Cloud cost savings because all of those tests are running somewhere on a cloud. And if they always fail or if it's just kind of a waste of spend, that can be useful, right? Recovering some capacity, right? We can always talk about time and productivity gains, right? So how much. Equivalent developer time are we losing on things that are not necessarily value add, right? And then sometimes we can correlate to business outcomes and correlate is usually the best we can do here, but there can be some pretty compelling correlations in terms of speeding up time to value and increase market share, for example.”

    2025-10-19 · Lenny's Podcast · How to measure AI developer productivity in 2025 | Nicole Forsgren · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  24. “And improved focus time. So that's from the developer side of you. Leadership often cares about, they care about those things, right? But they often care more about other things. So we could talk about usually costs and dollars, right? So can we accelerate revenue? What is our time to value look like? What is our velocity? How quickly can we get feedback from customers? And for folks and organizations that are in really competitive environments, that can be really compelling because it's all about speed. We could talk about saving money, right? So here we can look at maybe quantifying savings. So, you know, one example is test and build. If we can clean up a test and build suite to a developer, they really want to hear about time saved and”

    2025-10-19 · Lenny's Podcast · How to measure AI developer productivity in 2025 | Nicole Forsgren · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  25. “I think there are a few different things to keep in mind, right? Who is our key audience? And we usually have a few key audiences, right? We really want to be able to speak to developers because they're the ones that are going to be using the systems. They'll be partnering with you on either building them or at least providing feedback about what you're doing. And so for them, we often want to frame this in terms of things they care about. So time savings, right? If something gets faster, they can save time. you know they don't spend time doing setup when they don't need to anymore related that is reduced toil right so compliance and security are super important also many times it requires several several manual steps that i don't say they're not value add they are not value add from an individual human perspective right if we can automate as much as possible that's great”

    2025-10-19 · Lenny's Podcast · How to measure AI developer productivity in 2025 | Nicole Forsgren · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  26. “I'll say I've seen a huge impact, right? For smaller companies, hundreds of thousands of dollars for large companies The billions well, also, we need to learn how to communicate that, right? Like, what does the math look like? Are we many times we can look at saving time? We can look at saving costs. We can look at a lot of different things. We can look at speed to value and speed to market. We can look at risk reduction. But the gains really are there. I will mention that it tends to follow something like J-curve, right? So like you'll have a couple quick wins and it'll look like a big win. And then you'll hit a kind of a little divot where suddenly the really obvious projects, the low hanging fruit are handled. So now we need to do a little bit of work, right? We might need to build out a little bit more infrastructure. We might need to build out a little more telemetry so that we can capture the things we want to capture. And then once we get that done, then we start to see those benefits really compound.”

    2025-10-19 · Lenny's Podcast · How to measure AI developer productivity in 2025 | Nicole Forsgren · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  27. “Example of a small local change could be just cleaning up your tests and your test suites, right? Any team could do that. More global scale might be changing organization-wide process that is just overly cumbersome or throwing some resourcing into cleaning up the provisioning environment.”

    2025-10-19 · Lenny's Podcast · How to measure AI developer productivity in 2025 | Nicole Forsgren · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  28. “So there are a few ways to do this, right? So, if you're doing it yourself, Could do it with a couple engineers, maybe a PM or a PGM or a TPM to kind of help communicate because really comms plans are just so important here. On a small scale, right, what we want to do is look for those quick wins, look for things that you can do at small scale. Are there, you know, some folks call them things like paper cuts? Are there small things that you can do to help people see the value and feel the benefit themselves, right? How can a developer's work get better? How can their day-to-day work get better? Kind of build momentum from there. If you're working from a top-down structure and you have the remit, you still want some quick wins, but those quick wins can look a little more global in scale because you have the infrastructure or the backing to make different types of changes that aren't only local. So, you know.”

    2025-10-19 · Lenny's Podcast · How to measure AI developer productivity in 2025 | Nicole Forsgren · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  29. “Absolutely because Again, it's not just about productivity, right? We talked about this from kind of the frame and the lens of we need to be building the right thing and you want to be productive, but you also want to be thinking about, and this is what engineers are also just really incredibly good at, give them a problem and don't tell them how to solve it. And then they can solve it better, right? They have the freedom, they have the innovation, they have the creativity so that they can solve this problem. If it's only about productivity, then it's just like lines of code or never fs or whatever, right? But we really want to talk about value and how do we unlock value and how do we get value faster. And that involves, yes, making them more productive and removing friction because then they have the flow and the cognitive load and the things that we kind of talked about.”

    2025-10-19 · Lenny's Podcast · How to measure AI developer productivity in 2025 | Nicole Forsgren · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  30. “When does it come out? Yeah, developer experiencebook.com. So right now you can sign up for mailing list. We'll let you know when it's out on Prayorder and we'll also be sharing pieces of the workbook. So we've got almost 100 page workbook that goes along with the book. And then it should be out by end of year”

    2025-10-19 · Lenny's Podcast · How to measure AI developer productivity in 2025 | Nicole Forsgren · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  31. “Wherever you are right now, right? Like if you're kicking off a team, or initiative, you'll probably want to start at step one. You should definitely start at step one. If you're joining an existing initiative, you could jump into Picking the priority or implementing the changes. So those are, so there's seven steps. There are a few practices that we also recommend. So thinking about resourcing it. Change management. Making technology sustainable. And then also bringing a PM lens to this, right? How can we think about developer experience as a product? And how do we think about the metrics that we have as a product?”

    2025-10-19 · Lenny's Podcast · How to measure AI developer productivity in 2025 | Nicole Forsgren · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  32. “Of all the things that are left. What should I do next? And so we walk through some evaluation frameworks there. Step five is to sell your strategy. Once you've decided, now you have to kind of convince everyone else, right? So now you want to get feedback. You want to share why this is the right strategy right now. Step six is to drive change at your scale. So here we address folks that have local scope of control if you're starting on just a dev team. You want to do it yourself kind of grassroots effort or global scope of control, right? If you're, you know, the VP of developer experience or something, like there are some things you can leverage for a top down. And then how do you drive change when you're kind of somewhere in the middle? Because you can leverage both types of strategies. And then step seven is to evaluate your progress and show value and then kind of loop back around. And I will say that we wrote this so that you could kind of jump into any step.”

    2025-10-19 · Lenny's Podcast · How to measure AI developer productivity in 2025 | Nicole Forsgren · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  33. “So, the book goes through seven step process and then also kind of provides some. Key kind of principles at the end. Step one is to start the journey, right? So assuming you're kicking off, you can start the journey. And this involves what we have already talked about, right? Go talk to people, have a listening tour, synthesize what you learn, visualize the workload tools, right? Like get a handle on kind of what the current state is. Step two is to get a quick win, right? So start small, get a quick win, pick the right projects. share out what you've done. Step three is using data to optimize the work, right? So kind of establish some of your data foundation, find the data that's there, start collecting new data, use some surveys for some really fast insights and may include example surveys, step four then is to decide strategy and priority. Once you have some data, then you need to know of all the things that are potentially broken. And you've already got your question.”

    2025-10-19 · Lenny's Podcast · How to measure AI developer productivity in 2025 | Nicole Forsgren · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  34. “Cares about DevX, right? So definitely technology leaders. Anyone who's trying to kick off a DevX program or is working on a DevX improvement program, I think it's particularly relevant for PMs because if you're PMI something that involves software and building and creating software, improving DevX will only help your team and also you have key skills and insights and instincts that are so important to DevX that many times I will say I've seen engineering teams just miss.”

    2025-10-19 · Lenny's Podcast · How to measure AI developer productivity in 2025 | Nicole Forsgren · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  35. “Well, and I think it also shows us how much value you can get out of this, right? Like there's so much low-hanging fruit. There's so much unlocked potential and it's hard to know where to start a lot of times. Even in, I've been at large companies that have a lot of expertise and a lot of really, really smart people. But if you haven't kind of been in this space and thinking about it this way. It's hard to know where to start, or it's easy to make simple mistakes up front that mean like you kind of need to start over later. So I guess which kind of also brings us back to, you know, who is this book for? It's for anyone that...”

    2025-10-19 · Lenny's Podcast · How to measure AI developer productivity in 2025 | Nicole Forsgren · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  36. “So, I will say I also wrote this with Abhinoda, who has just of DX, he has incredible experience in the space, right? He's worked with hundreds of companies. And so it was kind of nice bouncing ideas off of him and also thanks to all of the engineering leads and dev exlets and CTOs and engineers that we talk to to kind of. Make sure that we our smells were right, right? And so, who is this before?”

    2025-10-19 · Lenny's Podcast · How to measure AI developer productivity in 2025 | Nicole Forsgren · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  37. “Yeah, I'm hearing incredible things like that, right? Well, and even also writing unit tests and spinning up unit tests and creating documentation and cleaning up documentation because I know now people are like, oh, well, we have agents. I don't need to. Don't need to read the docs because there's the code there. Turns out agents rely on good data, right? Because it's all about how they've been trained or how they've been grounded and better data gives you better outcomes. And some of that data includes documentation and comments. And the better documentation, the better comments you have, the better performance you're going to get out of your AI tools.”

    2025-10-19 · Lenny's Podcast · How to measure AI developer productivity in 2025 | Nicole Forsgren · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  38. “We do see, I know I worked with some folks who had kind of a whole set of companies they were looking at and they found that. AI was generating significantly more code for the people who were using it regularly. But then they also found that for folks who were like, you know, regular users of AI coding environments, AID The tool kind of gave them more code, and then the engineers themselves, the increase was double what the coding agent given them. So one, I'd say probably kind of a secondary or knock-on or just a smell, right, is it can unblock you. It can speed up the work that you would already do, right? I know sometimes when I work, it's like the first few minutes, it's hard for me to start. But once I get started, I'm there. And so they're really good at unblocking and unlocking that.”

    2025-10-19 · Lenny's Podcast · How to measure AI developer productivity in 2025 | Nicole Forsgren · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  39. “Say it's real. And I would also say we don't have great measures for it yet. We're still trying to figure out what to measure and what that looks like. One of the best is going to be velocity, right? All the way through the system. How quickly can you get a feature or a product or something through the system so that you can then experiment and test, right? Either from like idea to like final end or even kind of a feature and a piece through the system so we can test. really good. Now that's also hard to tie back directly to like a particular AI tool in the hands of a particular developer. But there are some other things that we can look at and we can see and that I've seen is, again, this kind of rapid prototyping. I hate lines of code when I'm going to use lines of code.”

    2025-10-19 · Lenny's Podcast · How to measure AI developer productivity in 2025 | Nicole Forsgren · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  40. “Now, I'm also seeing people kind of accelerate that into a few days versus a few weeks. And so they can kind of start those key stakeholder discussions from much more informed kind of filled out space.”

    2025-10-19 · Lenny's Podcast · How to measure AI developer productivity in 2025 | Nicole Forsgren · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  41. “We want to make sure that we're building and testing the right things. Are we partnering with the right? Do we have the data that we need, right? And I will say AI can't actually be a pretty good partner there if you keep, if you have like a good conversation with it and then also check with you experts, right? What type of data should I be looking at? What type of instrumentation do I need? What type of analysis can I do? Because then you can also go to your data science team and say like I'm planning on doing this. I'd like to, because let's not just yellow AB tests, right? Because that can be it's a shame to do a large test and end up disrupting users or disrupting customers or breaking privacy or security protocols and also end up with data that's unusable, right? Because you just can't get the signal that you're looking for.”

    2025-10-19 · Lenny's Podcast · How to measure AI developer productivity in 2025 | Nicole Forsgren · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  42. “Yes, or could be in the future, right? Like I think there are a lot of ways that we can pull in AI tools to help us Strategy and plan fairly well aligned, right? Or at least have like two or three alternatives that you want to test because now the engineering can go, or at least the prototyping especially can go much, much faster. We can throw out prototypes, we can run AB tests and experiments the customer facing, right? Assuming that, you know, we have the infrastructure in place, which allows us to learn and progress much faster before, right? Like some places it used to take, you know, months to get something through production to do AB testing and get feedback. We can do this in a day or two, right? Definitely under a week.”

    2025-10-19 · Lenny's Podcast · How to measure AI developer productivity in 2025 | Nicole Forsgren · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  43. “And you don't know about the quality, right? So, like, I think that's the other side is that you can always move faster, but faster for what? Are we making the right business decisions? I think, you know, that's especially where PMs come in. 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 want to do in what order and what rollout, right? The strategy is the core piece. And then think about sweetening that up. If we don't have the other pieces in place, I mean garbage in, garbage out.”

    2025-10-19 · Lenny's Podcast · How to measure AI developer productivity in 2025 | Nicole Forsgren · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  44. “That's usually a pretty good smell that there's friction somewhere because once you finally figure out your system and you're able to get work done, you don't, the switching costs can often be really, really high to go anywhere else. And so sometimes people will do that. But I've worked with companies where switching orgs within the company, you had to basically pay the same tax as a new hire because the systems were so different and they were so full of friction and it was so difficult to do so many things.”

    2025-10-19 · Lenny's Podcast · How to measure AI developer productivity in 2025 | Nicole Forsgren · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  45. “Most teams can move faster, right? And also, given what we know about cognitive load, not all speed gains are necessarily good, right? Upside is going to be kind of limited, right? Once you hit kind of a certain point, most people are not even near that point. I don't know a single team, frankly. How do you know? You know if You're always hearing about bills breaking, flaky tests. Overly long Processes, if you have to request a new system or if you need to provision a new environment, or if it's really, really hard to switch tasks or switch projects, right? So if someone has an opportunity to go work in another part of an org and they don't, for reasons that are unclear and like not political and anyone says anything about the system.”

    2025-10-19 · Lenny's Podcast · How to measure AI developer productivity in 2025 | Nicole Forsgren · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  46. “Now, there will be technical pieces that are very important, right? Especially now with AI, right? We're rethinking how build-in test systems work. We're rethinking feedback to users so that it's very, very customized in terms of what is shared and when it is shared. There are a lot of technical pieces that are involved. But that's not the only thing, right? It's necessary but not sufficient. And that doesn't have to be the place that you start.”

    2025-10-19 · Lenny's Podcast · How to measure AI developer productivity in 2025 | Nicole Forsgren · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  47. “I will say from a business leader standpoint, a lot of what you can do is provide structure and support for this organizational change. Communicate what you're doing, communicate what the priorities are, communicate why this is important, celebrate wins because If folks try to do this just like a wan off side fully isolated project, it's really challenging to get some good momentum and get people to care and to get them stay involved, right? Because it feels like Just another interim internal project that isn't going to matter or that isn't going to get celebrated, but it has these huge upside potential returns for the business.”

    2025-10-19 · Lenny's Podcast · How to measure AI developer productivity in 2025 | Nicole Forsgren · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  48. “I will say, you know, I'll kind of echo that process there's almost always a process that can be improved and that can be approved improved without a lot of engineering lift or a lot of engineering headcount, right? Most large companies in particular have something that is several steps. It's the way it is because it's the way it is, but that's no longer the way it is, right? And even small companies, sometimes it's just a little too yolo and you don't know what it is and you're kind of chasing everyone around. So if you can create a very lightweight process, that can also be helpful. That can be one of the best places to start, especially if you have Limited exposure to the whole rest of the org, right? Sometimes just a team process can help.”

    2025-10-19 · Lenny's Podcast · How to measure AI developer productivity in 2025 | Nicole Forsgren · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  49. “Go ask them. Yeah. And trust me, like most developers are going to be more than happy to tell you what's broken and what's bad. And I mean, I'll say there was one company that I had worked with. I remember they had a process that was like really difficult and it was on an old mainframe system and they were going to have to like replat the whole thing and so they never went to work on it or talk about it. Everyone hated it because it was this huge delay. I mean all they had to do was change a process. Sometimes all you have to do is change a process and they changed it so that instead of I think it was someone had to like print it out and walk it down three or four flights and then get approval and then someone else had to like walk it back up. And so it was just that interim. They didn't replat anything. They didn't redesign anything major. They just had to send an email.”

    2025-10-19 · Lenny's Podcast · How to measure AI developer productivity in 2025 | Nicole Forsgren · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  50. “Think of yesterday. What did you do yesterday? Walk me through it. What were the points that were just delightful? What were the points that were really difficult? Where did you get frustrated? Where did you get slowed down? Where was there friction? And if you go talk to a handful of people, a lot of times you can surface a handful of things that are a relatively low lift and still have impact. Or you can identify a process that's Unnecessarily complex and slow.”

    2025-10-19 · Lenny's Podcast · How to measure AI developer productivity in 2025 | Nicole Forsgren · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source