We’re excited to announce that we’re launching a new program for Netlify customers called Netlify Tech Lead.
Over the last few years, as part of Gatsby, a number of our team members had the privilege of working with many teams on their journey to build fast and secure dynamic web experiences. We’ve helped companies launch 100k page sites, double Lighthouse scores, and cut build times by 75%.
And since we launched the Tech Lead program in fall 2020, we partnered closely with engineering teams at companies of all sizes to help them achieve their business goals. It’s so exciting to see what our customers are building. And we’re proud of the results we delivered.
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We dove in with Moneygeek on a detailed front end performance audit to help their Core Web Vitals from red to green so that their content marketing efforts rank higher on Google.
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We went through Spinmaster’s build and publish lifecycle and tracked down inefficiencies so that content and dev teams could spend more time shipping and less time waiting for builds.
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Solera Health was looking for guidance as they began their journey with modern web development, and wanted to make sure they were building efficiently and correctly.
Our team has continued their work over the last months since we joined Netlify, and we’re excited to announce that today, we’re evolving the Gatsby Tech Lead program…into the Netlify Tech Lead program. We’re doing this because we’ve learned a ton about how people like to work with us, and a pattern of what people find most valuable:
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Help translating business requirements into technical requirements
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Experience working with headless architecture systems
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Guidance to build with best practices and avoid costly mistakes
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Training to make use of cutting edge framework features
In other words — a tech lead. We’re offering the expertise you need to empower your team to build amazing web experiences.
What is Netlify Tech Lead?
The Netlify Tech Lead program is for teams of any size or experience level who want to be empowered to build amazing web experiences. As part of the program, you’ll be assigned a dedicated Netlify Tech Lead.
As part of the program, you’ll be assigned a dedicated Netlify Tech Lead and a Netlify Success Manager. Their focus will be to work with you and your team to understand what you want to achieve with Netlify and chart a path to get you there.
What’s included in Tech Lead?
Netlify Onboarding
If you aren’t already on Netlify, we’ll help your team get set up and productive.
Biweekly Pairing
Your team will have 1 hour pairing sessions every other week with your Netlify Tech Lead. These sessions can be used for a variety of things, here’s some examples of what other teams have found most helpful:
Code review to ensure best practices from a front-end and builds perspective. Example topics:
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We refactored our hero component, did we leverage next-image correctly?
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We moved react-helmet to next/head, did we do that correctly?
Feature planning or scoping to help your team avoid unknown unknowns while implementing new features. Example topics:
- We want to add web forms to our decoupled drupal site, what is the best way to do this? How long will it take? What pitfalls should we avoid?
Pairing on implementation to help your team move in the right direction and make sure they don’t get blocked when they are unsure the best way to implement something. Some examples:
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Let’s migrate a script to the new Gatsby Script, or Next Script component
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Let’s go over what JavaScript is getting included in my bundles and why
Your Netlify Success Manager will conduct quarterly strategy sessions with you to ensure you’re getting the most value out of Netlify and the Tech Lead program. We’ll review what was accomplished in the last quarter, identify the top priorities for the next quarter and chart out a path to get there.
Who is this program for?
We’ve worked with a lot of different kinds of teams over the years, but here’s some examples of teams that have benefitted from having a Netlify Tech Lead.
Teams that are new(er) to the modern web. If you’re building your first Netlify site, a Netlify Tech Lead can help ensure that your site is fast, secure, and maintainable. You’ll get help avoiding complicated or expensive mistakes and be confident that your solutions will scale.
Teams that want to democratize modern web knowledge across the team. We’ve worked with teams where one person is pretty comfortable with modern Javascript frameworks, but others are less familiar. In those cases, you can lean on your Netlify Tech Lead for skill training and answering questions.
Experienced teams who want guidance on leveraging cutting-edge framework features. Maybe you’ve got a team with plenty of Next or Gatsby experience, but you want to make sure that your knowledge stays current with the latest best practices and features.
What does a year look like?
Your first year in the program would start out with (if applicable) Netlify onboarding, with us working together to get your content and developer teams onboarded and productive in Netlify.
We’ll make sure that your content management system (or systems!) are connected to Netlify to give your content teams a great preview experience. We’ll make sure your development team has properly configured development, staging, and production instances of your site — including preview builds of all pull requests — so they can test out changes before merging. By the end of the quarter, content & dev teams will feel productive.
Next up on your roadmap might be a dynamic page that you have some ideas on how to implement but you want help scoping and planning that feature. Your Netlify Tech Lead can help clarify your business requirements and help you decide between different rendering strategies — server side rendering, static site generation, deferred static generation, or client side rendering. Then, they’ll help review the work your team is doing to make sure it’s on the right track. By the end of a quarter, you’ll have a solution your team is really proud of!
Up next, you might identify that front end performance is a key priority. Over 6-8 sessions, your Netlify Tech Lead can show your team best practices for testing front end performance, reviewing network requests, analyzing JavaScript bundles and profiling JavaScript to help you identify performance issues. Your Tech Lead can help your team identify issues that need to be addressed, provide recommendations on how to fix them, and review the updates your team makes to confirm it’s been implemented correctly. By the end of a quarter, you’ll have improved your Lighthouse scores by 20+ points.
Once your team is confident on the performance side, it might be time to look at implementing some new framework features. Maybe your team has heard of the Gatsby Head API or Next Scripts, but isn’t sure what they are or why they would use them. Your Netlify Tech Lead can explain these to you and help you understand how your site would benefit from them, and guide your team as they implement these cutting edge features, reviewing their progress and making sure they don’t run into any blockers. After you implement these features, your team will be proud of your improved DX.
Heading into the next year, you may want to look at upgrading to the newest framework version — and your Netlify Tech Lead can guide your team every step of the way. And for teams who really just want a traditional performance audit as we’ve offered in the past, we can still do that in our tech lead program.
Interested?
The Netlify Tech Lead service helps teams level up their website and skills with the modern web. If the results we can help your team deliver sound interesting (and they should!), reach out to our team.
