What is Developer Experience to you?

For the OpenTelemetry Developer Experience SIG, the initial answer seemed obvious: better SDK configuration, clearer API usage, and smoother onboarding. But when we asked the community what they were struggling with, we actually discovered that our assumptions were only part of the story.
Users already knew how to get started. What they needed was help getting to production.

They wanted real use cases, production-ready examples, Collector deployment patterns, and scaling guidance. In response, the SIG began interviewing companies of different sizes and publishing their production OTel stories, including examples from Mastodon, Adobe, Skyscanner, and others.

In this talk, we will share how our understanding of developer experience changed through surveys, interviews, and community feedback. We will highlight lessons from real-world OTel adoption: what teams are doing well, where they still struggle, and which patterns are emerging across different environments.
Join us to learn what comes next for the DevEx SIG and how real production stories can shape the future of OpenTelemetry developer experience.