DevEx Metrics Dashboard
Spotify
Summary
Following a market opportunity brought by an industry shift towards AI tools, I led design and research for a developer productivity dashboard — helping middle managers demonstrate to executives that adoption of Spotify's developer platform was delivering results.
Shipped to immediate commercial impact: cited in 75% of new deals and used by 60% of all accounts.
Role: Product Design, User Research
Type: 0→1 Product
Background
The AI productivity wave made this more urgent. Budgets previously frozen were suddenly available, but only for tools that could demonstrate measurable impact.
The opportunity: build a developer productivity dashboard that could be used by middle management to show exec-level leaders that the IDP and their AI tools are working. Something that tells a story, not just displays data.
Spotify's Internal Developer Portal (IDP) product was gaining traction, but our Champions (engineering managers and directors who championed IDP adoption internally) were hitting a consistent wall. They needed to justify continued investment to their leadership, and they had no credible way to show ROI.
Getting Buy-In: Using AI to decide fast
Before starting any design work, we needed leadership and engineering to align on whether the dashboard was worth building, and what a "dashboard” actually meant. I used AI-generated prototypes as conversation artifacts to get cross-functional alignment.
Using AI prototypes meant alignment sessions could be genuinely interactive. I could update the prototype in real-time as feedback came in, turning these into live working sessions. It let me align executives on vision, get engineering to commit to scope, and validate direction with customers.
This approach is something I'd use again on other 0→1 work.
Transparency builds trust
"Metrics can be gamed — PR handling produces garbage outputs." - Engineering Director
Show metrics that teams can influence
“Surfacing build time to a team with no control over their CI pipeline creates anxiety, not insight.” - Data Scientist
Discovery: Learning from customers & experts
Discovery combined three sources:
Customer interviews with engineering managers and directors at companies evaluating developer platforms
Review of existing productivity whitepapers
Collaboration sessions with Spotify's own experts of developer productivity (data scientists).
Here are the key takeaways:
Low onboarding tolerance
“Other productivity measurement tools in the market require really heavy manual setup” - Engineering Manager
Improvement > industry benchmarking
“The best teams achieve elite improvement, not necessarily elite performance.” - Google’s DORA report.
From insights to design decisions
Overall Goals
Based on the research and discovery takeaways, and filtered through time and resource constraints, I defined four design goals for this project:
01 Maximize first impression
02 Earn user’s trust
03 Allow for nuanced interpretation
04 Optimize for speed of shipping
1) Out-of-the-box over completeness
We could only launch with 3 of the 4 DORA metrics, but I ensured the first thing users see is a dashboard with real & useful data, pulled automatically from existing API connections.
The first metric customers see always works out of the box; complete with supporting metrics, full historical data, and team-level breakdown
For metrics that still required configuration, I made a deliberate call to show all 14 from day one. Hiding them would have undersold the product's potential. Showing them reframes the experience from 'incomplete' to 'here's everything this can do.
2) Nuanced view over AI summary
AI summaries were cut because there was not enough training data to do it responsibly, and in this domain, a wrong interpretation can do real damage. I validated an alternative approach with internal experts: pairing each core metric with supporting metrics so managers can investigate causes themselves rather than trust an automated verdict.
Stacking core metric & supporting metrics encourages users to visually investigate causes of improvement or degradation, allowing for more nuanced interpretations.
Impact
3000+
Sign-ups for the first product launch with the new design system
4
New products using the new design system
