Your question is Prioritize Developer Experience Investment. Take a moment with it on the right.
Talk me through your thinking if you like. When you're confident, submit your answer and I'll grade it like a real screen (7/10 or better passes).
At Databridge, an internal developer platform team supports 180 engineers across 14 product squads. Build times have risen from 18 to 31 minutes over the last two quarters, onboarding a new engineer takes 4 weeks before their first production change, and release rollback incidents increased from 2 to 7 per quarter. The CTO has asked you to determine whether the company should invest in improving developer experience (DX) this half, or keep all engineering capacity focused on customer-facing roadmap commitments.
You are the program manager coordinating a 10-person platform team: 6 engineers, 1 engineering manager, 1 product manager, 1 DevOps lead, and 1 developer productivity analyst. You have 12 weeks to produce a recommendation and, if justified, execute an initial DX improvement program. This matters because Databridge plans to launch two enterprise features in Q4, and current delivery velocity is already slipping.
The CTO wants measurable productivity gains within the quarter. Product GMs want platform engineers assigned to feature delivery instead of internal tooling. The Engineering Director wants fewer incidents and less developer frustration. Finance will approve at most one additional vendor contract if ROI is clear.