Yes, you’re seeing correctly. That’s Luca Rossi tuning in via Hybrid Hacker as they joined forces this week with Refactoring. Exciting times! We could call 2024 the year of engineering intelligence. With a new wave of KPIs coming in to confuse everyone with acronym’s like DORA, SPACE, DevEx, TT and Flow.

Here’s a practical approach to engineering metrics from Luca:

🎯 Goal of metrics — Set clear expectations to avoid chasing your tail.

🚦 Types of metrics — The most important part, we prepared a summary below

🏁 How to get started — Put it into practice gently with your team

👑 Advice from the best — Luca connected with CEOs and Founders of software engineering and intelligence tools, including Typo’s Kovid 👋

It’s genuinely hard to point at many things that all software teams do, which in turn makes it hard to build products to improve them.

That said, I believe we are at a tipping point now, where there is finally more consolidation, many workflows have been figured out, and we have a better idea of what an elite engineering team looks like.

Like all models, metrics are imperfect. They only capture a part of the real thing, Luca emphasises, “They gives you clues, but never the whole picture.“ Many managers get frustrated by this as the temptation to silo the department and measure it with local KPIs is a lucrative illusion for anyone seeking certainty in the business.

Luca helps us clue together the various metrics frameworks by focusing on what he calls the WIP model, that stands for:

❤️ Wellbeing—How the team is doing

⚖️ Investment—What the team is doing

📈 Productivity—How the team is doing it