Insight certainty 3/5 debate potential 2/5

Forsgren: DevEx initiatives follow a J-curve before compounding benefits

Nicole Forsgren · How to measure AI developer productivity in 2025 | Nicole Forsgren · Oct 19, 2025 · at 45:48

Developer productivity researcher Nicole Forsgren explains the trajectory and ROI timeline of launching DevEx teams.

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“I will mention that it tends to follow something like J curve, right? So like you'll have a couple of quick wins and it'll look like a big, big win. And then you'll hit a kind of a little divot where suddenly The really obvious projects, the low hanging fruit are handled. So now we need to do a little bit of work, right? We might need to build out a little bit more infrastructure. We might need to build out a little more telemetry so that we can capture the things we want to capture. And then once we get that done then we start to see those benefits really compound.”

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