Elevator Pitch
You manage the company’s best team: the fastest cycle time, the highest planning accuracy, and the least amount of re-work. And then someone high up shuts down your project - what just happened?
The key to creating value is using business-oriented metrics - this session will help you do just that!
Description
You manage the company’s best team: the fastest cycle time, the highest planning accuracy, and the least amount of re-work. Your team has the lowest review time, the most weekly deploys, and the best bugs / KLOC ratio. And then someone high up shuts down your project - what just happened?
In the software industry, we have created a set of KPIs to measure the efficiency of our development teams. While these KPIs measure efficiency well, they are usually not enough to measure success. The main reason is that they are completely disconnected from the business KPIs. This disconnection often leads to ineffective communication between organizations in the company, mainly product and engineering. In this session, we will discuss overcoming these challenges by measuring development teams using business KPIs. We will understand what business metrics development teams can impact and how, and what frameworks and organizational structures can support that. We will also discuss when dev metrics are appropriate and when they are effective at helping us impact our business KPIs.
In this session, you will learn: - Types of metrics you should use to measure the success of your team - Using the OKR framework to: - Align engineering and product organizations - Empower teams to innovate and collaborate - When should you use dev metrics
Notes
Having experienced firsthand the pains of dev metrics and the value of managing using business KPIs and OKRs, I believe this talk can bring a lot of value to many engineering managers and organizations. I was the director of engineering of the successful startup Epsagon (which was recently acquired by Cisco) - the methods described in this session are precisely what led us to our business success.