RDEL #34: How do developers adopt new tools? (with Monica Bajaj, VP Developer Experience at Okta)
This week we interview Monica Bajaj and discuss the practice (and research) behind how developers adopt new tools.
Welcome back to Research-Driven Engineering Leadership. This is our first RDEL Guest Post, where we ask engineering leaders with deep expertise to share their perspectives on engineering topics, and we’ll use research to enrich the discussion.
The tooling landscape is undergoing a transformation, and many teams are evaluating new tools to support engineering processes. This week, we consider: how do developers adopt new tools? To help us answer this, we welcome Monica Bajaj, VP of Developer Experience at Okta.
👋 Monica Bajaj has over 20 years of experience building and scaling products and global engineering teams. She is VP of Engineering at Okta, leading their Developer Experience and Fine Grained Authorization product portfolio. Monica has a rich background in the technology industry working at companies like Workday, NetApp, Cisco, and Perforce.
She’s heavily involved in the tech community, from serving on the board of directors of SheTO to being an advisory board member of Berkeley SkyDeck. When not obsessing over technology, she spends her time volunteering with the Boy Scouts and hiking with her family.
🎤 We’ll now turn it over to Monica.
Q: From your experience, what factors help engineers build trust in the tools they choose to work with?
At its simplest, engineers need to feel that Aha! moment when a new tool helps them improve their productivity: through time, quality, focus and really solving their use case.
To dig into that further, here are a few dimensions that help engineers build trust in their tools.
Usability: The tools should meet the needs of the engineers they serve.
Testing and Validation: Engineers can conduct rigorous tests with the tools to ensure that they are providing the right value. This can be through simulations, trials, and finding ways to test scenarios close to their own.
Documentation: Clear documentation that captures capabilities, limitations, and examples to help engineers build confidence.
Support and Community: Knowing there are channels for support or maintenance can alleviate any concerns of deprecated tools. Engineers want to know that tools will be supported for as long as they plan to adopt them. Tools with strong communities give engineers more evidence of the value and stability of those tools.
Flexibility: Tools need to be flexible enough to solve for various use cases (which allows them to add more value).
Security: Tools need to have the right level of privacy and security so they can continue to grow in adoption within a team.
Maintainability: Tools that are easy to maintain help minimize downtime in production and deliverables. It also prevents unexpected breakdowns that could disrupt operations.
Extensibility: It allows engineers to customize the workflows specific to their organization. As the project grows, an extensible tool can handle scale, loads , and various integrations. Technology continues to evolve and it is important to buy a tool that is relevant for the long term.
The Research: A team at Microsoft used an industry interview study to develop a framework for how engineers build trust with tools. They refer to it as the PICSE framework, which stands for Personal, Interaction, Control, System, and Expectations.
Q: It seems like there are a lot of factors to consider for building trust. What do you believe are the biggest challenges or hurdles to building that trust and driving adoption?
There are a number of challenges, but I would focus on these four:
Lack of Usability: tools that are overly complex and do not have frictionless experience lead to lack of adoption. Increased complexity, lack of intuitive design lead to longer learning curve.
Cost and investment: Cost of acquiring tools along with training and implementations can be a significant barrier. ROI and long term benefits of tools are really important for teams to clearly understand.
Integrations and compatibility: This can include lack of seamless integrations, or not having enough SDKs.
Organizational culture & support from the leadership: Resistance from management or lack of support for innovation can be barriers in bringing in new tools, adoption, experimentation, and continuous improvement.
Q: How should managers evaluate the effectiveness of a tool they’ve introduced to the team?
A useful way to determine effective a tool is to look at the effort and impact on the team once a tool has been introduced.
To evaluate effort, teams can consider:
Onboarding effort: is it easy to get the team up and running with the tool?
Adoption and engagement: does the team adopt the tool as part of their development processes? Are they engaged, or is usage a source of friction?
Integration cost: Is the tool easy to integrate in existing systems?
Customization: Does the tool need to be integrated or is it extensible enough, and if so, how challenging is that to do?
To evaluate impact, think about the following dimensions:
Productivity: does the tool provide a meaningful improvement in the productivity of the team?
Quality: does the output of the tool meet the quality bar the team has set? (This relates to accuracy, reliability, consistency, security, and compliance)
Cost: At the end of the day, is the cost worth the value? Does the need to maintain the tool change that calculation?
Q: We’ve discussed success, challenges, and measuring value of new engineering tools. To wrap it up, can you tell us what sources engineers use to discover new tools?
I actually did a talk about this at SaaStr last year (slide below). Developers are unique because they generally adopt tools from trusted sources, and need to see value early. Some of the best places where engineers discover new tools include:
Online communities, forums, newsletters, and professional networks they trust
Conferences and events
Open source projects they use or contribute to
Word of mouth through their peers
We hope this guest post gave you more confidence from both research and application on how to successfully introduce and adopt new tools on your team. If you have any feedback, we’d love to hear it. Thank you to Monica for joining us!
Wishing you all a Happy Research Monday.
Lizzie