Slides for Measuring an engineering organization.

Published on May 20, 2023. speaking (10), talks (8)

Last week, I gave a 30 minute talk to a group of CTOs and VP Engineerings in San Francisco about measuring engineering organizations. This talk was essentially this blog post, and here are the slides.

A few topics worth highlighting:

Measurement educates you, and your audience, about the area being measured. Even flawed measures can be very effective educators. Don’t get caught up on not measuring things because they have some flaws, let the audience learn about those flaws
Instrumentation is costly to implement. Let specific problems guide you to instrumentation, don’t instrument widely without a clear goal
Many new companies cargo-cult Amazon’s approach to metrics, but that doesn’t necessarily work
If teams don’t trust each other before you have metrics, they probably won’t trust each other must afterwards. Metrics are implicitly objective, but there are many judgment choices within selection and measurement

Unfortunately, I don’t have a recording of the talk itself, although I imagine I could record it relatively easily once my time opens up a bit more. Which won’t be in the near future! Quite busy with the new role, capturing the new ideas I’m learning in my new role, and finishing up my next book.