Uma Namasivayam, Senior Director of Engineering Productivity at Dropbox, shares how the company evolved its developer productivity program from measuring developer experience (DXI) to preparing for agentic engineering. Key findings include: AI adoption grew from 30% to 100% in six months, doubling PR throughput; engineers used freed capacity to tackle technical debt and migrations; and faster code generation is shifting bottlenecks downstream to code review, validation, and CI/CD. Dropbox is now redesigning its entire SDLC for agentic workflows, building an orchestration layer called Nova (already generating 1 in 12 PRs), and moving beyond PR throughput toward metrics like AI contribution, loaded cost per PR, agentic workflow coverage, and time to ship.
