How Block is accelerating engineering velocity through developer experience

The Block ecosystem of brands – including Square, Cash App, Spiral and TIDAL – is driven by more than 4,000 engineers and thousands of interconnected software systems. Today, Block is doubling down on engineering velocity, investing in major initiatives to help teams ship software even faster.

The initiatives will build on an already relentless focus on speed that has helped Block empower more than 50 million individuals and four million sellers.

“We want engineering velocity to remain our competitive advantage,” says Azra Coburn, Block’s Head of Developer Experience. “Block is a large and complex organization, and it’s still growing. We realized that if we wanted to operate at the speed of a startup, we needed to make a more dedicated investment.”

With this aim, Block has established a global developer experience function focused on empowering developers to innovate rapidly and deliver high-quality products. This article goes behind the scenes on what’s fueling Block’s investment in developer experience, key initiatives including the role of an engineering intelligence platform, and how the company measures and drives success.

Sustaining velocity at scale

Block’s approach to developer experience has evolved significantly as the company has grown. In the early days, different teams and business units operated independently, each with its own tools and workflows. While this freedom initially enabled rapid time-to-market, it also resulted in complexity as the company grew to include multiple business units and thousands of developers.

“With different teams and business units working in different ways, the cognitive load for developers became significant,” Coburn explains. “It required us to rethink our workflows and change how teams were structured.”

To maintain high velocity at scale, Block recognized the opportunity to unite the engineering function around standardized tools and workflows, or “golden paths.” The aim is to reduce duplication while investing in a core set of patterns and tools, enhancing productivity and fostering a culture of continuous improvement.

Setting the roadmap

Block’s developer experience team determines its roadmap using quantitative and qualitative data to identify opportunities and measure impact. With this approach, the team has identified opportunities to reclaim over 500,000 hours of developer time annually.

“Our approach is to first and foremost listen to our internal customers, who are our engineers,” says Coburn. “We run a quarterly survey that directly contributes towards our roadmap in developer experience, helping decide how we invest and prioritize. Our investments are driven by what we hear from our engineers.”

Block collects developer experience data with the help of DX, an engineering intelligence platform that helps streamline data collection and reporting, as well as enabling Block to benchmark itself against industry peers.

Through the DX platform, Block is able to provide developer experience metrics to all leaders and teams across the company. “We value working in the open, so we’ve opened the survey responses up to everyone,” Coburn says. “Every engineer has access to look at their team’s data and everyone else’s data, and benchmark themselves against our industry peers.”

Coburn’s team also publishes an annual internal State of Engineering Velocity report highlighting key metrics and benchmarks captured in DX. “We have four key metrics that we’ve nicknamed DEVIQ, which stands for developer experience, velocity, impact, and quality,” he says. “Our approach is derived from the DX Core 4 framework, and we track these metrics across Block both as a company and at the team level.” Block reports quarterly on DEVIQ progress to the entire executive team.

Block’s vision

Guided by this data, Block has identified core priorities for improving developer experience, the most notable being instant developer environments, establishing golden paths, and bold investments in AI. Together, these initiatives form the Developer Experience team’s vision for accelerating engineering velocity.

Instant developer environments

Block’s quarterly developer surveys have highlighted several key areas for improvement, one of which is the delays engineers faced in setting up and iterating on local development environments. A key pillar of Block’s strategy is its “InstantDev Vision” focused on building a best-in-class internal developer platform where, as Coburn puts it, “everything just works.”

“We are building a collection of developer tools that are turnkey,” Coburn explains. “We’ll need faster local builds, projects to be self-bootstrapping, or hermetic, and services to be run ephemerally. We want zero-click configuration – environments that just work and allow engineers to focus on delivering business value.”

Investing in golden paths

Establishing golden paths is a priority. Consolidating the toolchain down to a small number of focused investments gives developers leverage. “It allows us to have a handful of tools that are curated and focused,” Coburn explains. “These select choices can then be of high quality, well-supported, documented, maintained, secure, and reliable.”

Another golden path is reducing time spent on information search and discovery, which Block estimates could save up to another 200,000 hours of developer time annually. “We’re consolidating all of our documentation into one platform across Block that is heavily integrated with AI to assist with search and content.”

Leveraging AI

AI sits at the cornerstone of Block’s developer experience strategy. Through its AI-native instant developer environment Block is actively embedding AI in all engineering workflows. “Our goal is to increase speed to market by 10x and improve efficiency across all aspects of software development,” Coburn says. “For example, most recently we built an AI migrator tool. Migrations from legacy codebases that used to take teams months to complete can now be done in days.”

Block also launched an open-source AI Agent Codenamed Goose. Engineers can use Goose to pull Jira tickets, automatically create pull requests, and even pre-fill them with code. Unlike other tools that simply generate code, Goose acts as a full agent –developers can assign it tasks, and it delivers results.

Block expects its efforts in AI Engineering Velocity to deliver a 30% boost in productivity while significantly improving reliability and employee engagement. By automating bottlenecks with AI tools, engineers are empowered to focus on innovation, advancing product development and fueling the company’s growth in fintech.

Delivering incremental success

Delivering on an ambitious vision like Block’s doesn’t happen overnight. Rather, Coburn’s team optimizes for fast experimentation and a metrics-driven approach.

“We’re very experimental and fast to fail,” Coburn says. “Each quarter we find where the biggest pain points are, and we tackle those problems incrementally, while staying aligned to our broader vision.”

Block’s vision reflects the company’s commitment to sustaining fast-paced engineering velocity. Its investments aim to position Block’s engineering teams to continue innovating at scale while maintaining the company’s position as a market leader.