I think at a lot of other companies, this type of process can sometimes become mandated from the top down where an executive says, hey, all teams are reviewing and focusing on these metrics. So I want to ask you in your view, is that a good approach and in what cases should a team not be focusing on these types of metrics? Yeah. The most important thing you want to see is trends. You want to know, is thatGraph going up or is that graph going down over a long period of time as a sense of like, are we in general making the right decisions or do we need to in general pivot?
Max Kanat-Alexander, the Tech Lead for the Developer Productivity and Insights Team at LinkedIn, shares an inside look at LinkedIn’s metrics platform and how teams across the organization use it.
Discussion points:
- (1:31) Why Max shares how his team is measuring productivity
- (3:20) Why some teams use metrics and some don’t
- (6:03) The types of metrics Max’s team focuses on
- (12:59) The role of TPMs
- (17:05) How Max would measure productivity if he weren’t at LinkedIn
- (25:04) Surprises in how teams are using metrics at LinkedIn
- (31:27) The tooling required to enable metrics for teams to use
- (36:41) Qualitative versus quantitative metrics
- (40:39) Measuring code quality at Google
- (46:16) Whether a centralized team should own measurement
Mentions and links:
Connect with Max on LinkedIn or Twitter
Read the article, Measuring Developer Productivity and Happiness at LinkedIn
Listen to the first interview with Max and his colleague Or Michael Berlowitz: Episode 23
Abi’s blog post on the Three-Bucket Framework for Engineering Metrics