Multinational Technology Company — Developer Experience Study

A major technology company was preparing to bring a new content management platform to market and needed to understand how developers actually experienced building on it — not against an internal benchmark, but against the tools developers were already using in the real world.

Highdive designed and led a comparative developer experience study, recruiting developers to build applications across the new platform and a set of established CMS alternatives. Participants documented their experience in detail across the full development process — setup, configuration, extensibility, documentation clarity, and day-to-day usability.

The structured feedback surfaced specific friction points that weren’t visible from internal testing, where developers knew the product too well to encounter it the way an outside developer would. Comparative findings showed exactly where the new platform held up against mature competitors, where it fell short, and what would need to change before developers would choose it voluntarily rather than because a client required it.

The work gave the product team research-grounded prioritization for pre-launch improvements — and gave the go-to-market team a clear picture of which developer segments were most likely to adopt early and why.