Ask Your Developer, a playbook for unleashing developer power, from Twilio CEO Jeff Lawson, available now

Ask Your Developer, a playbook for unleashing developer power, from Twilio CEO Jeff Lawson, available now

Just four short years ago, Gartner predicted there would be five times the amount of work than developers to do that work by 2021.

That prediction has been realized, and accelerated, by COVID, as every company shifted to digital during quarantines and lockdown.

Many found that boxed software solutions didn’t fit the unique needs of their businesses and customers; they needed developers to design and build custom experiences.

For business leaders, that means it’s never been more critical to build a culture and organization where developers want to be; where they can thrive, tackling real business challenges, not acting simply as the ‘code monkeys’ so many companies treat them as.

Failure to recognize this and act on it will inevitably lead to disruption, Twilio CEO Jeff Lawson writes in Ask Your Developer, his debut book launching today.

Get your copy now

If 2020 has taught us nothing else, it’s that businesses must evolve to survive—sometimes at a challenging pace—when faced with unprecedented challenges.

And evolve they did; by their own measures, business leaders said COVID-19 and its related pressures drove digital acceleration at their companies by six years on average.

If companies want to continue to compete—to survive, even—in this new landscape, they’ll continue to invest in their developers, recognizing that no matter their business model or product, they are, or need to evolve to be, a software company. And by unlocking your developer talent and giving them developers the freedom to be creative, business leaders can unlock their full potential.

Ask Your Developer dives deep into the ‘why’ behind this is true, and then gives business leaders a step-by-step guide to finding, nurturing, and retaining top developer talent. The key ideas are:

Assign problems, not tasks. Traditionally, business leaders come up with the ideas and hand them off to developers to write the code. Leaders should insead let developers solve the problems first-hand: who could know better about applying software solutions to your business problems than those who deeply understand technology?

Tolerate failure. Experimentation is the prerequisite to innovation. Leaders must create an environment where developers can experiment, and celebrate the failures along with the wins.

Keep developers close to customers. When developers talk to customers they can deliver better, more useful features in less time.

The developer shortage mentioned earlier, though, is a challenge all business leaders face as they look to grow their developer community and culture.

That’s why all the proceeds from the book will be donated to organizations who teach people to code, or create opportunities for those typically underrepresented in tech.

It’s essential we continue to build a more diverse community of builders to fill the demand, and Twilio hopes to help do just that. Learn more, and get your copy today.