[deely3]

> For teams you can measure meaningful outcomes and improve team metrics.

How? Which metrics?

[anthonyskipper]

My company uses the Dora metrics to measure the productivity of teams and those metrics are incredibly good.

[Capricorn2481]

These are awesome, but feel more applicable to DevOps than anything else. Development can certainly affect these metrics, but assuming your code doesn't introduce a huge bug that crashes the server, this is mostly for people deploying apps.

I think it's harder to measure things like developer productivity. The closest thing we have is making an estimate and seeing how far off you are, but that doesn't account for hedging estimates or requirements suddenly changing. Changing requirements doesn't matter for DORA as it's just another sample to test for deployment.

[neaanopri]

There's only one metric that matters at the end of the day, and that's $. Revenue.

Unfortunately there's a lot of lag

[ImaCake]

> Unfortunately there's a lot of lag

A great generalisation and understatement! Often looking like you are becoming more efficient is more important than actually being more efficient, e.g you need to impress investors. So you cut back on maintenance and other cost centres and the new management can blame you in 6 years time for it when you are far enough away from it to not hurt you.

[fuzztester]

s/Revenue/profit/g

[ozim]

That is what we pay managers -to figure out- for. They should find out which and how by knowing the team, familiarity with domain knowledge, understanding company dynamics, understanding customer, understanding market dynamics.

[seanmcdirmid]

That's basically a non-answer. Measuring "productivity" is a well known hard problem, and managers haven't really figured it out...

[beefnugs]

haha that is not what managers do. Managers follow their KPIs exactly. If their KPIs say they get payed a bonus if profit goes up, then manager does smart number stuff and sees "if we fire 15% of employees this year, my pay goes up 63%" and then that happens

[hshshshshsh]

That sounds like a micro manager. I would imagine good engineers can figure out something for themselves.