How to Fix Your Engineering Team's Velocity Problem

Product velocity ≠ just faster shipping.

In this episode of Everything Product, we sit down with Laura Taco, CTO at DX, to break down what engineering productivity really means — and why most orgs get it completely wrong.

We go deep into:

🔹 Why “just ship faster” is a broken mindset

🔹 The Core 4 Framework: Speed, Effectiveness, Quality, Innovation

🔹 Common traps: flashy dashboards, tool overload, data without literacy

🔹 How AI tools (like GitHub Copilot) are changing productivity metrics

🔹 How to measure and actually act on developer productivity signals

Meet Hosts: 

Srinath - [https://www.linkedin.com/in/skotela/]

Phani - [https://www.linkedin.com/in/phanivuyyuru]

Sid - [https://www.linkedin.com/in/sidsaladi/] [https://sidsaladi.substack.com/   [https://mobile.twitter.com/Sidsaladi]

💎 Here are more resources for you

🚀 The Ultimate PM Launch Pad - Blast Off Your Career Now! 🚀

https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL0KSCr65RCTOupMjArBvrML5VWUGzaKqt

🧰 Master the PM Toolkit - Equip Yourself for Success! 🧰

https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL0KSCr65RCTM4acJOjQYFvOVMzfiEFlqE

⚡️ Stay Ahead of the Tech Curve - Charge Your Knowledge Now! ⚡️

https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL0KSCr65RCTMvYe4lAYpfdbDoNdPbA33o

Whether you're a Product Manager, Engineering Leader, or Startup CTO, this conversation will change how you think about speed, scale, and building high-velocity teams.

🎧 Featuring:

Laura Taco (CTO, DX)

Phani Vuyyuru & Srinath Kotela (Hosts)

🔗 Resources + Core 4 survey → in the show notes

Timestamps:

0:00 – Intro: Who is Laura Taco & What is DX

2:00 – How Laura got into engineering productivity

4:30 – Why Engineering Productivity ≠ More PRs

6:00 – The true definition: Removing Friction

8:00 – Why Product Velocity is a Product + Engineering Problem

10:30 – Misuse of “Speed” and the velocity-direction trap

12:00 – Aligning Product & Engineering: Avoid the canoe problem

14:30 – Why teams measure but don't improve

17:00 – The real issue: data literacy  dashboards

19:30 – Why PMs can lead data literacy efforts

21:00 – Should metrics be prescriptive or narrative-driven?

23:00 – Who owns engineering productivity in an org?

25:00 – The Core 4 Framework explained

28:00 – Speed: How to use (and not misuse) PR throughput

30:00 – Effectiveness: Developer Experience Index (DXI)

32:00 – Quality: Why Change Failure Rate still matters

33:00 – Innovation Ratio: What % of your time builds the future

35:00 – Internal benchmarking vs. toxic team comparisons

37:00 – How to interpret industry benchmarks

39:00 – Deploying Core 4 in 2 weeks, not 6 months

41:00 – How to combine qualitative + quantitative signals

43:00 – AI & Dev Productivity: The real impact (not hype)

47:00 – Stack trace analysis  Codegen for AI productivity wins

49:00 – Final advice: Cultivate an experimental mindset

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