Episode · Lenny's Podcast · 2025-10-19
Lenny Rachitsky & Nicole Forsgren: books mentioned on Lenny's Podcast
How to measure AI developer productivity in 2025 | Nicole Forsgren
Nicole Forsgren created the most widely used frameworks for measuring developer productivity—DORA and SPACE. She wrote the foundational book Accelerate and is about to release her newest book, Frictionless, a practical guide for helping teams move faster in the AI era.
Lenny Rachitsky discussed Frictionless by Nicole Forsgren and others. Nicole Forsgren recommended Outlive by Peter Attia and others, Back Mechanic, How Big Things Get Done by Bent Flyvbjerg and others, and The undoing project by Michael Lewis.
Books mentioned, in the order they came up
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Frictionless
Discussed“Let's talk about this framework, this book. So you're publishing a book called Frictionless, which sounds like a dream. How do you create a a dev team that's frictionless?”
Where to get it
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Outlive
Recommended“What are two or three books that you find yourself recommending most to other people? Outlive by uh Peter Aia is fantastic.”
Where to get it
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Back Mechanic
Recommended“Another one that's maybe related. I hurt my back. Um, so like it's not great. Back mechanic by Stuart McIll is incredible. So, shout out to anyone who has uh hurt lower back.”
Where to get it
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How Big Things Get Done
Recommended“It's kind of a random one. I will say I love how big things get done. I can't pronounce the name. I think one's they're Scandinavian. One is um but it's it kind of dissects really large projects through recentish history and where they failed and why.”
Where to get it
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The undoing project
Recommended“So how do we think about approaching what is essentially going to be a very large project. Um and then sorry I'm going to throw in a bonus one. The Undoing Project by Michael Lewis.”
Where to get it
Other mentions in this episode (9) — ad reads, self-promotion and passing references, never counted
Passing Accelerate
“She wrote the most important book in the space called Accelerate and is about to publish her newest book called Frictionless, which gives you a guide to helping your team move faster and do”
Passing Frictionless
“She wrote the most important book in the space called Accelerate and is about to publish her newest book called Frictionless, which gives you a guide to helping your team move faster and do”
Passing Frictionless
“You have a book coming out that explains the how to do this. Well, so we're going to get to that.”
Plugged Frictionless
“So I guess which kind of also brings us back to you know who is this book for? It's for anyone that cares about DevX, right? So definitely technology leaders um anyone who's trying to kick off a DevX program”
Plugged Frictionless
“Point people to the book real quick. What what's the URL? How do they get it? When does it come out? Yeah, developerexperiencebook.com.”
Plugged Frictionless
“And that's where I will say we talk about this a little bit in the book. Uh you know how do we deal with attribution challenges? So like what was responsible for this?”
Plugged Frictionless
“And uh we included an example in the book. You can just ask a few questions, right? How satisfied are you? uh what are the biggest barriers to your productivity or what are the biggest challenges to getting work done?”
Plugged Frictionless
“If you can't answer a question with data, don't get it. And you have example surveys in your book for folks that want to just copy and paste and not have to think about this.”
Plugged Frictionless
“So online you can find the book at developerexperiencebook.com. Um, I'm at af.com and LinkedIn occasionally. Sometimes it's a mess. I I try to wade wave through all of the uh noise I get there.”