Have you ever driven a car that pulls to one side? It’s often subtle, but after a while, the counter-steering effort becomes impossible to ignore. This metaphor comes to my mind whenever I encounter a common developer experience pattern: the veering toward first-order effects.
To set the context a bit more, let’s arrange the effects of producing developer surfaces in two orders. The first-order effects relate to producing the developer surface. When we ship an API, we want it to be adopted, to be used broadly. Thus, when we measure first-order effects of our efforts, we look at the API adoption rate, developer satisfaction, etc.
The second-order effects relate to developers producing user experiences using our developer surface. At the end of the day, an organization that invests into shipping APIs does so — intentionally or not — to influence the overall state of user experience in some way. When we measure second-order effects, our metrics will likely track changes in the user experience. Does using our APIs result in products that are more secure, performant, accessible, etc. for the user?
Based on what I’ve seen working with developer experience teams throughout my career, there’s a pronounced pull toward first-order effects. They are easier to measure, have a shorter feedback loop, and are more familiar to folks accustomed to shipping consumer products. Even if a team sets out to influence the state of user experience at the beginning of their journey, the appeal of relative immediacy of first-order effects is so strong that the original intention often gets left behind.
A common symptom of forgetting to counter-steer toward second-order effects is the loss of strategic flexibility within a larger organization. When the first-order effects become the means onto themselves, they tend to get entrenched in a local maxima of developer expectations, stuck in an optimizing loop. An organization that contains teams stuck in that particular way feels like it is unable to do anything about it: everyone is seemingly doing “the right thing,” and prioritization exercises quickly devolve into peanut buttering. When something like this is happening, it’s a good hint that the concept of second-order effects got rolled into a dusty corner of the team’s shared mental models space, or ejected altogether.
To counter-steer, organizations must exert conscious effort to keep second-order effects in the shared mental model space. Whether it’s constantly pointing at them during the all-hands, setting up the metrics structure to reflect user experience shifts, or even just reminding about the unyielding force that — like that darned car — never quits pulling, it’s an investment that’s well-worth the price.
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