Nicole Forsgren
SREs are developers who happen to focus on reliability. You write code, build tools, manage complex workflows, and experience friction every single day. That friction has a measurable cost: slower incident response, more mistakes under pressure, higher on-call burden, and ultimately, degraded system reliability.
We should also address the elephant: AI is generating way more code, leading to more deployments and bigger changes to your systems. If your operational friction is already high, AI is about to amplify it exponentially.
This talk applies developer experience frameworks (SPACE, DORA) to operational work. You'll learn how to measure SRE experience, connect it to reliability outcomes, and identify high-leverage changes to reduce friction. Walk away with practical things you can do tomorrow and a framework for making the business case that investing in SRE experience is a reliability strategy.
Dr. Nicole Forsgren is considered an expert in DevOps and developer productivity. She has led efforts to improve DevEx and AI-native developer productivity at some of the largest companies in the world. She is author of two best-selling, award-winning books: Accelerate and DevOps Handbook 2e. Her latest book, Frictionless, was recently released. She has been an entrepreneur (with an exit to Google), professor, developer, sysadmin, and performance engineer.
Nicole’s work has been published in several peer-reviewed journals and conferences. Nicole earned her PhD in Management Information Systems and Masters in Accounting from the University of Arizona. She lives in the PNW and recharges her brain with gym time, tacos, and Diet Coke.
author = {Nicole Forsgren},
title = {Mean Time to {WTF}: Why Developer Experience Frameworks Belong in Your Incident Retrospectives},
year = {2026},
address = {Seattle, WA},
publisher = {USENIX Association},
month = mar
}
