Building Developer Experience - Brick by Brick

High autonomy led to cognitive overload for 1200 engineers. See how The LEGO Group built a developer portal to fix it, brick by brick.

#1about 3 minutes

Building a digital organization in a legacy company

The LEGO Group established a 1200-engineer digital unit with product teams and a DevOps model to build modern digital experiences.

#2about 5 minutes

Identifying key developer experience pain points

An annual "Voice of the Developer" survey revealed high cognitive load and difficulties with documentation and code reusability despite good autonomy.

#3about 1 minute

Focusing on discoverability, documentation, and communication

To address developer pain points, the DX team focused its investment on three core pillars: discoverability, documentation, and communication.

#4about 10 minutes

Implementing a developer portal with Spotify Backstage

LEGO built "Baseplate," a customized Spotify Backstage portal, to centralize information about products, APIs, documentation, and engineering tools.

#5about 1 minute

Investing in better documentation writing and training

To improve documentation quality and consumption, the team invested in training engineers and bringing in technical writers for inspiration.

#6about 3 minutes

Fostering community with events and communication channels

A curated newsletter, community events, bi-annual dev fairs, and an internal developer conference help build community and share knowledge.

#7about 4 minutes

Exploring AI, developer metrics, and inner sourcing

Future developer experience efforts will focus on deliberately adopting AI, using developer metrics for improvement, and scaling an inner sourcing culture.