Developer experience is about reducing friction between creating an idea and delivering business value in production. It includes factors like lead time, deployment frequency, and monitoring. DevEx has three components: workflow, platforms, and the developer experience itself. The ideal workflow follows progressive delivery principles. Teams should focus first on automating the inner development loop and CI/CD processes, then on observability and best practices. Questions around local vs cluster development, verification approaches, and whether to provide guardrails can help guide platform design decisions.