Engineering productivity, metrics, & morale

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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

Productivity metrics morale video

Slides

Productivity metrics morale slides

 

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