What if you could improve developer productivity so much that it freed up 500,000 developer hours across 4,000 engineers? How could that impact your engineering team’s velocity? What effect would that have on your end users?
Block is an ecosystem of brands including Square, Cash App, Spiral and TIDAL. These tools work for the economic empowerment of more than 50 million users and another 4 million sellers.
The company, which has about 16,000 employees, a quarter of whom are engineers, faced growing challenges in helping developers work efficiently. Tool sprawl, fragmented workflows and lack of visibility slowed teams down, making collaboration harder and reducing velocity.
Today, Block is doubling down on developer velocity, investing in major initiatives to help teams ship software faster, including an instant developer environment, golden paths and an AI-native developer workflow.
“We want engineering velocity to remain our competitive advantage,” said Azra Coburn, Block’s head of developer experience. “Block is a large and complex organization, and it’s still growing. We realized that if we wanted to operate at the speed of a startup, we needed to make a more dedicated investment in our developer experience.”
In just nine months, Block established a developer experience (DevEx) team dedicated to helping its internal developer customers deliver value to end users faster. Learn what’s fueling Block’s investment in developer experience, its early platform wins and how it measures and drives developer productivity.
Sustaining Velocity at Scale
Block’s approach to developer experience had to evolve significantly as the company scaled to thousands of developers.
Because Block operates as four distinct brands, some of which were acquired, teams operated independently with their own tech stacks, tools and workflows. While this autonomy enabled speed to market, it eventually led to inefficiencies that became unsustainable.
“With different teams and business units working in different ways, the cognitive load for developers became significant,” Coburn said. “It required us to rethink our workflows and change how teams were structured.”
To maintain its high velocity at scale — and to consolidate developer tooling and cost — Block decided to unite the engineering function around standardized tools and workflows, or golden paths that show developers the easiest way to accomplish regular tasks.
The approach, Coburn said, was to reduce duplication while investing in a core set of patterns and tools. The end goal was to enable developers to do their best work and to encourage a culture of continuous improvement.
Setting a Platform Engineering Roadmap
Block tracks both quantitative and qualitative developer metrics to drive its platform engineering roadmap.
“Our approach is to first and foremost listen to our internal customers, who are our engineers,” Coburn said. Then, “our investments are driven by what we hear from them.”
Block collects all of this data using DX, a developer productivity solution that streamlines data collection and reporting. The company also uses DX to benchmark itself against industry peers and against different teams, products and divisions.
“We value working in the open, so we’ve opened the survey responses up to everyone,” Coburn said. “Every engineer has access to look at their team’s data and everyone else’s data, and benchmark themselves against our industry peers.”
Coburn’s team publishes an internal “State of Engineering Velocity” report highlighting key metrics and benchmarks captured in DX. Nicknamed DEVIQ, this tracks four key developer metrics at the team and organizational level:
- Developer experience
- Developer velocity
- Impact
- Quality
Block is an early adopter of the DX Core 4 developer productivity framework, which measures across speed, effectiveness, quality and impact.
Block’s Three-Year DevEx Vision
Guided by these developer metrics, the developer experience team has identified strategies that it believes will reclaim over 500,000 hours of developer time annually.
That translates to 125 hours per developer per year. Considering the average U.S. developer salary, that’s a potential for over $13 million saved annually, just in developer efficiency.
Block’s developer experience strategy focuses on three priorities:
- Instant developer environments.
- Established golden paths.
- Bold investments in AI.
These are the pillars of a three-year platform strategy.
Instant Developer Environments
The most significant developer feedback that surfaced was the frustration and time lost when engineers were setting up and iterating in local environments. The “InstantDev” strategy focuses on building a best-in-class internal developer platform where, as Coburn put it, everything just works.
“We are building a collection of developer tools that are turnkey,” she said. “We’re targeting faster local builds, projects to be self-bootstrapping or hermetic and services to be run ephemerally. We want zero-click configuration — environments that just work and allow engineers to focus on delivering business value.”
Developers can also create custom workflows by installing project-specific libraries and tools, while still ensuring ecosystem compatibility. This intentional flexibility fosters experimentation and shared learning across diverse configurations and software versions.
Investing in “Golden Paths”
As is often the case with organizations that house different brands, Block identified many areas of tooling redundancy, which resulted in duplicate efforts across teams.
Establishing “golden paths” is a priority in most platform engineering strategies. Golden paths are laid down as the simplest, self-service way for developers to accomplish regular, non-differential tasks. Block’s DevEx team is consolidating the toolchain down to a small number of focused investments in an effort to increase developer leverage.
“It allows us to have a handful of tools that are curated and focused,” Coburn said. “These select choices can then be of high quality, well-supported, documented, maintained, secure and reliable.”
Another platform best practice Block is following is using generative AI with natural language search, making it easier to discover services and their owners. This approach also underlies the company goal of consolidating documentation into one platform across the organization.
Block estimates that better documentation searchability and service discoverability could free up 200,000 developer hours annually — plus the invaluable benefit of enhancing shared understanding among teams.
Leveraging Generative AI
Block is embedding AI into every stage of software development to remove bottlenecks and improve efficiency. By using AI to accelerate migrations, automate routine tasks and streamline code reviews, Block is reducing the time engineers spend on manual processes — allowing them to focus on higher-impact work.
“Our goal is to increase speed to market by 10x and to improve efficiency across all aspects of software development,” Coburn said. “Most recently we have built an AI migrator tool. Migrations from legacy codebases that used to take teams months to complete can now be done in days.”
Block has also launched open source AI agent Codename Goose. Engineers can use Goose to pull Jira tickets, to create pull requests automatically and to even pre-fill them with code. Unlike other tools that simply generate code, Goose acts as a full AI agent — developers can assign tasks and it delivers results.
Block expects its efforts in AI-native developer velocity to deliver a 30% boost in productivity while significantly improving reliability and employee engagement. By eliminating developer bottlenecks with AI tools, Coburn said, engineers can focus on innovation, advancing product development and fueling the company’s growth.
Delivering Incremental Success
Delivering on Block’s ambitious vision does not happen overnight. Rather, Coburn’s team optimizes for fast experimentation in response to developer metrics.
“We’re very experimental and fast to fail,” Coburn said, as the approximately 16,000-person company looks to retain startup speed. “Each quarter, we find where the biggest pain points are, and we tackle those problems incrementally while staying aligned to our broader vision.”
Block’s three-year developer experience strategy reflects the company’s commitment to sustaining fast-paced engineering velocity. Their investments are enabling Block’s engineering teams to innovate at scale and compete on a global stage.
The post How a DevEx Initiative Aims To Save 500,000 Developer Hours appeared first on The New Stack.
