A lot of organizations seem to focus on tailing indicators such as lines of code written, or the number of bugs found, and I think that’s part of what fuels the perception that being an engineering leader is one of the most difficult roles in modern companies because they don’t paint an accurate picture of how things are today.
The first thing is to get data that tracks key performance metrics. Many organizations often start with DORA metrics to create “slides for the board” that show the overall health of the engineering organization. This is a great place to start, but you can take this further by incorporating your project tracking into the data to measure how you allocate resources across the engineering function and whether or not that allocation is enough to meet product delivery timelines. There are a handful of tools out there that make this easy, like Sleuth and LinearB. A quick search should surface other solutions for this too.
A lot of organizations seem to focus on tailing indicators such as lines of code written, or the number of bugs found, and I think that’s part of what fuels the perception that being an engineering leader is one of the most difficult roles in modern companies because they don’t paint an accurate picture of how things are today.
The first thing is to get data that tracks key performance metrics. Many organizations often start with DORA metrics to create “slides for the board” that show the overall health of the engineering organization. This is a great place to start, but you can take this further by incorporating your project tracking into the data to measure how you allocate resources across the engineering function and whether or not that allocation is enough to meet product delivery timelines. There are a handful of tools out there that make this easy, like Sleuth and LinearB. A quick search should surface other solutions for this too.