Why Measurement Matters
DevRel work can feel intangible — you're improving relationships, trust, and sentiment. Without measurement, it's impossible to know whether your efforts are working or whether you're investing time in the wrong activities. Two metrics anchor internal DevRel: the Net Promoter Score (NPS) for sentiment, and adoption rate for behavior. Sentiment without behavior change is vanity; behavior change without positive sentiment is compliance. You want both.
The Net Promoter Score (NPS)
NPS is a metric originally developed for customer satisfaction research, now widely used in internal developer experience programs. It is built around a single question sent anonymously to your developer population:
"On a scale of 0 to 10, how likely are you to recommend our internal platform to a new colleague joining your team?"
Respondents fall into three categories:
| Score | Category | Meaning |
|---|---|---|
| 9–10 | Promoters | Superfans. They actively recommend the platform and help onboard others. |
| 7–8 | Passives | Satisfied but unenthusiastic. They use the tool but won't advocate for it — and may switch to a shadow IT alternative if one appears. |
| 0–6 | Detractors | Unhappy users. They are actively telling colleagues the platform is frustrating or unreliable. |
The Formula:
$$NPS = \% \text{Promoters} - \% \text{Detractors}$$
An NPS above 0 means more promoters than detractors — a baseline of health. Above 50 is excellent. Above 70 is world-class (rare for internal tools). Tracking NPS quarterly gives you a trend line: is developer sentiment improving, stable, or declining? A sudden drop after a major release is a signal that the release introduced significant friction, even if support tickets haven't spiked yet.
The follow-up question is as important as the score. Always include an open-text field: "What is the one thing we could change to improve your score?" The qualitative responses are where the actionable insight lives. An NPS of 42 tells you things are going well. The open-text responses tell you why and what to fix next.
Adoption Metrics: Behavior Over Sentiment
NPS measures how developers feel. Adoption metrics measure what they do. Track these alongside NPS:
- Active usage rate: What percentage of eligible teams have used the platform at least once in the last 30 days?
- Voluntary adoption rate: Of new projects started this quarter, what percentage chose the platform's Golden Path without being required to?
- Feature penetration: For a specific new feature, what percentage of users who could use it have tried it at least once?
- Time-to-first-value (TTFV): How long does it take a new developer to go from account creation to their first successful deployment? This is the single most important onboarding metric.
The combination of NPS and adoption metrics tells a complete story. High NPS with low adoption means developers like the platform in theory but face barriers to using it in practice (onboarding friction, missing integrations). High adoption with low NPS means developers are using the platform because they have to, not because they want to — a fragile state that will collapse the moment an alternative appears.
A common interview question for Platform Engineering roles is: "How do you know if your platform is actually improving developer productivity?" Weak answers cite deployment frequency or DORA metrics in isolation. Strong answers describe a measurement system: NPS for sentiment trend, voluntary adoption rate for genuine value delivery, and TTFV for onboarding health. Explain that you correlate these metrics — a rising NPS alongside rising voluntary adoption is evidence of genuine improvement, while rising adoption alongside falling NPS is a warning sign of forced compliance masquerading as success.