Why having happy developers is just as important as having happy customers

When GoPay was first rolled out in 2016, the digital wallet, which was launched by Indonesian ride-hailing giant Gojek, was touted as a seamless solution to the inconveniences of cash-based transactions.

At the time, motorcycle taxi riders would have to deal with carrying wallets full of cash and also risk not having the right amount of change. Giovanni Sakti – the head of infrastructure engineering for customer payments at GoPay’s parent company GoTo Financial – said it was a “stressful” time that eventually paved the way for GoPay.

In the years following its introduction, the platform added more solutions to meet the growing needs of consumers. It has now become an all-in-one money manager, where users can schedule bill payments as well as buy insurance and investment products.

While these solutions were necessary for the e-wallet’s growth, GoPay’s rapid expansion added a lot of pressure for developers, said Giri Kuncoro, developer experience technical lead at GoTo Financial, during an episode of Google Cloud’s That Digital Show podcast.

This was a tipping point for the company. According to Kuncoro, GoTo Financial realized that if it wanted to keep providing users with the best service, it had to make sure that its developers were properly supported with tools that were designed with great developer experience (DX) in mind.

“Developers are human too”

In Kuncoro’s words, DX is a user experience (UX) perspective for developer-facing tools or products. “Developers are human too, but they’re more hands-on and technical. That’s what makes DX different from UX,” he shared.

When asked what constitutes good DX, Kuncoro said that developer tools can be assessed in terms of their discoverability, usability, capability, and stability.

Giri Kuncoro, developer experience technical lead at GoTo Financial / Photo credit: GoTo Financial

“Discoverability and usability are all about how easy it is for developers to find what they need and use the tools,” he explained. A good tool is also capable of supporting different developer styles and is reliable enough to run a successful customer-facing product.

“The tools that we built for developers are ultimately reflected back to the end customers and the business,” said Kuncoro.

Slowing down collective developer velocity

While most small teams can make do with simple cloud-based tools, the need for good DX becomes more important as companies grow. With more business requirements on the table, developers often add new applications or features that make a company’s tech stack more complex.

This could cause developers to spend considerable time configuring tiny, low-level details that may distract them from writing good code and building great products as well as slow down their “collective developer velocity.”

Photo credit: gmast3r / 123RF

GoTo Financial experienced this when it embarked on a planned migration to the Istio service mesh setup in 2020. Service meshes are a layer of software infrastructure that allows parts of different services to quickly and reliably share data with one another.

The move was so laborious that after a year of work, only 2% of the company’s system had been migrated.

“It really impacted the team because we couldn’t take on business requirements or develop new features – all our time was focused on the migration process,” recalled Kuncoro.

When the company employed a tool with better DX, as much as 80% of the system was migrated in less than a year.

That’s when GoTo knew that it was time for an intervention.

A super app for developers

In 2021, GoPay’s infrastructure engineering team built GoPay.sh, a developer-centric “super app” that brings various development functionalities onto a single platform. Through GoPay.sh, developers can interact with one another, deploy apps, debug their systems, and more.

It also helps DX practitioners solve a common issue: growing teams often make siloed decisions in the interest of speed, and for every decision that’s made, the process gets more complex. This makes it harder to integrate new features into the legacy system.

By concentrating various functionalities on a single platform, GoPay.sh streamlines whole processes to deploy various services all at once, Kuncoro explained. As a result, tasks that typically take days can be done within 30 minutes or less.

Additionally, GoPay.sh was specifically designed to enforce consistency in the development process by limiting variations, said Sakti, who leads the infrastructure engineering function at GoPay.

Giovanni Sakti, head of infrastructure engineering for customer payments at GoTo Financial / Photo credit: GoTo Financial

“Rather than allowing people to plug in any kind of database they want, we decided to limit the variations of databases that can be created with our tool,” he explained. “You can only pick from databases that we are fully confident our platform can maintain.”

That said, the system still provides some flexibility so developers can accommodate different contexts and needs.

This is key in the area of data sovereignty regulations, a major issue for fintech firms. Different jurisdictions have their own requirements as to whether data must reside on premise or can be offloaded onto the cloud. To accommodate the needs of developers, GoPay.sh gives them the flexibility to customize their code to abide by these requirements.

Hearts and minds

While Kuncoro admitted that most startups don’t focus on DX in the early years – when survival is all that matters – he shared that starting early can yield significant rewards.

Companies should assess whether they are displaying any “symptoms” of bad DX, he suggested. Some common signs are a slow onboarding pace, frequent need to migrate services, too many work silos, competing internal tools, or unhappy developers.

However, Kuncoro warned that implementing DX principles will not be easy, and its evangelists should expect to face pushback from detractors within the company. Even GoPay’s team needed two years to convince their organization of the importance of DX.

Rather than dismissing their concerns, DX torchbearers need to listen to their critics, understand what they need and don’t like, and collaborate to form workable solutions.

Naturally, this is a process that will take time, but as Kuncoro said, “DX is a strategic investment, not a technical pass. It requires engineers to develop empathy with developers. That’s a very important ingredient for working on DX problems.”

“Developers have trust issues, but we can touch their hearts. They need to know we are here to solve their problems,” he concluded.

GoTo Financial wants to accelerate growth opportunities for businesses everywhere through a suite of digital services for consumers, merchants, and developers. With its proprietary GoPay.sh platform, GoTo leverages world-class DX principles to help developers build better products for their customers.

You can find out more about how GoTo Financial can help you build better products here.

This content was produced by Tech in Asia Studios, which connects brands with Asia’s tech community. Learn more about partnering with Tech in Asia Studios.