By Vaibhav Verma
Developer experience is hard to sell. There's no revenue line item. No customer asks for faster builds.
But ignoring developer experience is how you build frustrated, slow teams.
If you're trying to convince your CTO to invest, here's how.
Calculate the Cost
Build time: 45 minutes. 10 engineers * 45 minutes = 7.5 hours per day = $375/day = $93,750 per year.
Add test flakiness, deployment time, debugging, onboarding.
Total cost of poor devex: 10-20% of engineering salary cost.
For a 50-person team at $150K average salary:
- Total salary: $7.5M
- Cost of poor devex: $750K - $1.5M per year
Investing $100K to improve devex pays for itself in 1-2 months.
The Pitch
Opening: "We're losing $X per year in engineering productivity due to slow builds and deployments. I want to fix that."
Problem: Be specific. "Our test suite takes 45 minutes. Our deployments take 8 hours."
Business impact: "Slow builds mean engineers wait. Slow deployments mean we can't respond to bugs fast. Slow onboarding means new hires are unproductive for 6 months."
Solution: Specific improvements with targets. "Parallelize tests (target 10 minutes). Automate deployments (target 15 minutes). Improve documentation (target 2-week onboarding)."
ROI: "This saves $X per year in engineer productivity. Investing $100K has 1-2 month payback."
Timeline: "Test speed in 2 weeks. Deploy automation in 4 weeks. Full improvement in 8 weeks."
Objections You'll Face
"We don't have time. We have to ship features."
Poor devex is costing you $X per year. Fixing devex is shipping features faster.
"This is engineering's problem, not business."
Every minute spent waiting is a minute not building features. That's a business problem.
"We've tried before. It didn't work."
What failed? This time we'll do it differently.
The Improvements That Matter Most
Priority 1: Fast Tests
Cost: Low (parallelize, mocks, remove slow tests) Impact: High (instant feedback) Timeline: 2-4 weeks Target: 10 minutes total
Priority 2: Fast Builds
Cost: Medium (caching, incremental compilation) Impact: High (engineers wait less) Timeline: 3-6 weeks Target: 5 minutes for incremental
Priority 3: Fast Deployments
Cost: Medium (automation, infrastructure) Impact: High (respond fast to issues) Timeline: 4-8 weeks Target: 15 minutes from commit to production
Priority 4: Easy Onboarding
Cost: Low (docs, setup scripts) Impact: High (new hires productive sooner) Timeline: 2-4 weeks Target: 2 weeks to first shipped feature
How to Structure the Proposal
- Executive summary: "Improve productivity 15% for $100K."
- Current state: "Builds take 45 minutes, deployments 8 hours."
- Target state: "Builds take 5 minutes, deployments 15 minutes."
- Business impact: "Saves $X per year."
- Timeline: "Improvements in 2-4-6-8 weeks."
- Resources: "2 engineers for 8 weeks."
- Metrics: "Track build time, test time, deployment time."
Making It Stick
Once approved:
- Pick a champion. Someone to drive improvements.
- Measure baseline. How slow is it now?
- Set targets. Specific, measurable improvements.
- Measure progress. Track over time.
- Celebrate wins. Show the team improvements.
- Keep improving. This isn't one-time.
Frequently Asked Questions
Q: How do we measure engineer productivity?
Imperfectly. Track: time spent waiting, time to complete tasks, onboarding time, deployment frequency. These are proxies.
Q: What if the CTO says no?
Ask why. Address the real concern. If it's resources, reduce scope.