What you measure gets improved

Are you currently tracking any metrics in the engineering team?

Beyond the technical ones like uptime/downtime, latency, error rates and infrastructure costs.

Feature release frequency?

Security incidents?

Bug fix time?

Revenue?

CLTV?

NPS?

MRR?

The thing is …

As engineers we love to focus on the operational metrics like uptime, database load and infrastructure costs.

But if you want engineering to contribute to business goals, then engineering should track those as well.

There’s too many choices of what you can measure, so use this as the guideline:

If nothing will change in your behaviour if a metric goes up or down, then it’s probably not worth tracking it.

Focus on what you can influence.

Btw, there’s two types of metrics. The inputs (actions taken to achieve a goal) and outputs (results of those actions).

But that’s a story for another day.

Yours,

Taj