How Honeycomb Is 2Xing Its Engineers with AI

About this episode

Emily Nakashima discusses Honeycomb's approach to AI adoption and its impact on engineering productivity.

“Our internal target is to 2X our impact with AI over one year. Unlike some more outlandish mandates, that one is both aspirational and achievable,” says Emily Nakashima, SVP of Engineering at Honeycomb. In this episode of The Hangar DX podcast, Emily shares how Honeycomb approached AI adoption at scale and why they try not to focus on metrics that can be gamed but rely more on self-reporting by developers. Emily also discusses: - Why flattening org charts is a short-term optimization that will cost companies later - How Honeycomb issued a company-wide 2X mandate and what actually happened when they did - Why the "buffet phase" of AI tool adoption is over and what a structured rollout looks like - Why self-reporting beats hard metrics when measuring AI's impact on your team - Why observability is more critical than ever in a world of non-deterministic AI-generated code - Why AI SRE tools demo well but often fall short, and what they need to actually work 00:00 Introduction to Developer Experience and AI 02:19 Emily's Journey in Engineering and Leadership 05:15 Navigating Career Growth in Engineering 06:28 Cultural Shifts in Engineering Management 09:50 The Evolving Role of…

People in this episode

Host: Ankit Jain

Guest: Emily Nakashima

Topics covered

• AI adoption
• engineering management
• developer experience
• product development
• observability

Keywords

• AI
• engineering
• Honeycomb
• self-reporting
• observability
• productivity
• SRE tools

Mentioned in this episode

Organizations: Honeycomb

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