50,000 Hours: A Developer Experience Story

This is the story of our teams saving 50,000 hours of engineering time for our business. We work in cloud productivity engineering here at Capital One and, alongside other specific business goals, spent a year working with a ‘north star’ goal of “saving 50,000 engineering hours”. This means process improvements, delivery optimisations, reworked tooling, but most of all being user centric; understanding our engineering needs and troubles to find the best ways to save time. The experience was fantastic, but reasonably not without some bumps in the road, so we want to talk about how we came up with the idea, the many successes we got from it and the things we’d change about it as we head into 2025. We hope this is an inspiring talk to generate discussion about how tech organisations can optimise their deliveries and what methods work best based on our experience. The talk will be made up of a story of our journey and experiences through this goal. We'llcover why we went for a big goal like this, and how we decided on this one,discuss people’s reaction and perception throughout trying to achieve the goal,address the various challenges we experienced with the goal and what to watch out for, plus how we dealt with issues,talk about the key impacts we got from it and why/how others can adopt mindsets to achieve similar good results,And to finish off, conclude with how we are trying to evolve it to continue improving the developer experience at Capital One.