Metrics

Productivity metrics

• This is a sticky topic.
• You’ll get a lot of pressure to produce productivity metrics, for individuals, teams, and organizations.
• This is made worse by the fact that the GTM side of the house is extremely good at this, and their work is far more mathematical. They can quite rigorously model things like, “If we spend half a million dollars, how will that affect how many customers we can bring in”. Things are much fuzzier in engineering, not because of laziness, but because the nature of the work is far different.
• The SPACE of Developer Productivity - ACM Queue
• Measuring engineering organizations by Lethain
• See also Metrics tooling

Engineering reporting at a board meeting

General board info

• Engineering is rarely a focus in board meetings. That’s not ideal, but often the case. In fact, engineering being discussed much in a board meeting is often a sign things aren’t going well.
• Copresenting with product is often a good approach.
• Often good to focus on deep, specific topics.
• Focus on productivity, efficiency, and people stats.
• Tie presentation to product strategy and key initiatives.

Some format examples

Person A: I have used a pretty basic template here for many years at this point. Same for internal, all hands

• 1 slide on OKRs (or “goals” if the company hates OKRs) target metrics and actuals for the quarter and targets for the rest of the year
• 1 slide on last quarter delivery + results
• 1 slide on next 3 quarters plan

Person B: https://devinterrupted.substack.com/p/4-engineering-slides-ceos-love-that

Person C: may not matter where you are but might:

• cloud costs / your ability to scale customers without linearly increasing costs

• hiring: your ability to quickly hire / onboard new engineers and make them successful

• delivery: your ability to regularly deliver new features that PM / exec team have said are important… I measured this once by showing that the previous engineering leader hadn’t delivered a press release worthy feature in 2 years and made it a point to work with PM & Marketing to make sure that we were regularly delivering new features & improvements to the customer base

• reliability / uptime: how many incidents do you have, how bad are they, and are you regularly fixing the issues that caused them?