Why Quant KPIs are never enough to diagnose engineering team performance issues

Why Quant KPIs are never enough to diagnose engineering team performance issues(buildingromes.substack.com)

2 points by aadilmaan 5 years ago | 3 comments

kevsim 5 years ago |

> Unfortunately, this is only half the story

I'd go further - I'd say in many, many teams, quant KPIs like burndown rate and velocity are downright misleading and often harmful. It provides the wrong incentives for the team - it stresses output over outcomes. The main thing that should matter is how quickly you're improving things for your users - their metrics are the ones to track.

I'm a bit biased as I'm working on a startup [0] that is trying to click with teams that really value collaborating closely to provide impact for their users over being a feature factory that maximizes their velocity.

0: https://kitemaker.co - the product management and collaboration tool that's crazy fast and has deep integrations to your favorite tools like GitHub, Figma, Slack and Discord.

aadilmaan 5 years ago | |

My biggest bone is exactly as you point out, how quickly or how large is our bug pile never reflects the end outcome. Numbers can be skewed and the really smart leaders dig deeper and only use the numbers as a indicator never the diagnoses. Your tool looks freaking interesting. Really cool.

kevsim 5 years ago | | |

Thanks! Try it out and let us know what you think. It's free to use up until you've created 250 work items (which takes most teams a while). We love having chats with teams that try it out, both to know what would make it work better for them, but also just to talk through how they work today and see if we can help them reach their aspirations for how they want to collaborate as a team.