You will find below my talk (sponsored by the non-profit https://big-on.dev/ in Singapore) on engineering productivity, metrics, and morale. The questions were awesome. 😎
It's all about psychological safety for the team for the best combination of team morale and team effectiveness.
Summary
Development metrics
- Team productivity: Per department and per team merge request (AKA pull request) rate, defined as the number of requests merged divided by the number of employees on that team
- Productivity of the review process: Open merge request review time
- Quality: Past due issues by severity and type (customer-facing, security, infrastructure)
- Web application performance: LCP (largest contentful paint)
- Backend application health: Error budgets (error rates and performance analysis per service/endpoint)
- Investment: Issue count by weight by type (feature, bug, maintenance, other)
Team Morale
- Use a combination of sync (meeting) and async (in writing) discussions, with async being the priority.
- Turning on video during meetings is highly encouraged.
- Recording meetings when possible
- Always explain the "why" and not just the "what"
- Release retrospectives (what went well, what didn't, what actions to take)
- Quarterly social activities
- Social slack channels
- Skip level meetings and AMA (ask me anything) sessions
- NPS (net promoter score) for employees
Remote and results
- Measure results, not hours
- Hire where the best people are (vs in central locations)
- Written processes
- Written knowledge
- Transparent sharing to increase collaboration
- Anyone can contribute
Video
Slides
