Mobile Developer Experience at Slack
Article Summary
Slack's 8-person Mobile DevXp team saved $240K annually just by improving PR notifications. Most companies are massively underinvesting in developer experience.
Staff engineers Ahmed Eid and Arpita Patel share how Slack's Mobile Developer Experience team evolved from a 3-person informal group in 2017 to a strategic 8-person team. They reveal their systematic approach to measuring and improving mobile developer productivity.
Key Takeaways
- Reduced iOS time to merge from hours to 4.5 minutes using Bazel
- Cut test failure rates from 57% to 4% with auto-detection systems
- Migration from Jenkins to BuildKite achieved 99.96% uptime, 41% faster merges
- Xcodegen eliminated Xcode project merge conflicts entirely
- Quarterly NPS surveys and direct observation drive prioritization decisions
Critical Insight
Strategic investment in developer experience infrastructure delivered measurable ROI through faster builds, stable CI, and dramatically improved developer satisfaction.
