DX Platform & Product Management: A Perfect Match
American Airlines, the world’s largest airline, has been working on developer experience for many years to allow developers to work in more efficient ways through a delightful developer platform.
In 2020, they made the decision to have Backstage be the foundation of “Runway,” their developer platform and have grown a large plugin ecosystem around their expansive platform to enable delivery faster and safer.
In this talk, they will discuss their initial hackathon strategy, engaging the Backstage community, UX flow, templates, improving feedback loops, and much more.
By bringing together the pieces developers need to do their jobs, there is much less friction, developers spend more time writing code, and developer experience has improved.
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Timothy Haagenson
Developer Experience Productivity Manager @ American Airlines
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Ben Burbank
Sr. Manager of DX Engineering @ American Airlines
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Take it further with Develocity
Ben and Tim’s talk on American Airlines’ developer experience platform showcases how they are optimizing developer flow, building a strong community, and continuously improving the platform. Develocity empowers developers and accelerates software delivery by addressing pain points like complex troubleshooting, slow build times, and limited observability of developer tooling.
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Meet the speakers
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Timothy Haagenson
Tim Haagenson has 15 years of experience in software development and has dedicated his career to agile ways of working. As a developer, technical lead and now product manager, he has played a part in transforming development teams at multiple companies, resulting in their ability to deploy value daily. Tim continues to learn a tremendous amount about lean product delivery, and he enjoys sharing his experience with others. Tim is currently a Product Manager helping to build developer experience platforms for American Airlines.
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Ben Burbank
I am a passionate technologist who loves to make life easier for developers and tech enthusiasts. When DevOps was first getting started I jumped in with both feet joining the community in 2015 and bringing those learnings back to American Airlines. In 2017 I stood up the Dojo coaching practices at American Airlines where we worked with teams to improve their overall development skills, tech stack and their ability to deliver value sooner while meeting the necessary security controls. Today I lead the DX platform teams who complement the Dojo in ensuring developer experience is a delight and promotes technical excellence.
