In this week's episode of Waves of Innovation, host Daniel Jones reconnects with "Big" Rob Edwards, a Google Cloud expert, DORA contributor, and long-time collaborator. Their history goes back a decade to the trenches of early cloud platform delivery, giving them a shared language for the massive shifts occurring in the industry today.
Rob brings a rare dual perspective to the podcast. By day, he works with enterprises across North America to optimize their software delivery using Google Cloud. By night, he has recently completed a Master’s degree in Psychology, where his thesis focused specifically on "Developer Productivity in the Age of Generative AI."
The conversation kicks off with a deep dive into Rob’s contributions to the upcoming DORA report. While the industry obsesses over code generation, Rob and Daniel argue that "writing code faster" is rarely the bottleneck.
They explore the critical importance of Value Stream Management (VSM). Rob shares real-world anecdotes—including drawing process maps on glass windows in major banks—to illustrate how invisible friction points kill velocity.
They discuss a specific case study where a customer thought they had a CI/CD problem, but VSM revealed they had five manual merges on the critical path to production. The key takeaway from the DORA research? AI is an amplifier. If applied to a bad process, it simply creates a larger pile of inventory at your bottlenecks. VSM is the "force multiplier" that allows AI teams to actually ship value rather than just generating PRs.
The heart of the episode is a fascinating exploration of Rob’s academic thesis. Interviewing senior engineers, he uncovered that the identity of a developer is fundamentally changing from a "Coder"—measured by syntax and output—to a "Conductor."
Rob explains the concept of "metacognition" (thinking about how we think). As developers move to agentic workflows, they are forced to stop thinking about the for loop and start thinking about system architecture and intent. Rob notes that participants in his study stopped reading technical manuals and started reading architectural books to better direct their AI agents.
