Engineering Enablement by Abi Noda

This week’s guest is Jenny McClain, who leads R&D Team Enablement at Toast. Jenny’s team focuses on enabling individual teams at Toast to drive their own productivity improvements, and this conversation dives into how they tackle this problem.

Discussion points: 
  • (1:19) How the R&D Enablement team works
  • (2:50) Why the team was formed
  • (4:31) The types of work the team focuses on
  • (7:31) Identifying the problems this team would solve
  • (11:23) How team embeds work
  • (17:19) The learning resources the team develops and maintains
  • (20:55) Who creates and maintains the learning resources
  • (23:10) How enablement stays connected with teams at scale
  • (25:51) How the team plans work with qualitative and quantitative measures 
  • (29:37) Formats for sharing knowledge between teams
  • (33:05) How other companies can think about the enablement function
  • (37:40) Enablement as a career path
Mentions and links:
Follow Jenny on LinkedIn
Tuckman’s stages of group development
Working Agreements template from Steve Sobel, Director of Engineering at Toast - one of the resources featured in Toast’s Team Health Toolkit 

Creators & Guests

Host
Abi Noda
Abi is the founder and CEO of DX (getdx.com), which helps engineering leaders measure and improve developer experience. Abi formerly founded Pull Panda, which was acquired by GitHub.

What is Engineering Enablement by Abi Noda?

This is a weekly podcast focused on developer productivity and the teams and leaders dedicated to improving it. Topics include in-depth interviews with Platform and DevEx teams, as well as the latest research and approaches on measuring developer productivity. The EE podcast is hosted by Abi Noda, the founder and CEO of DX (getdx.com) and published researcher focused on developing measurement methods to help organizations improve developer experience and productivity.