Rethinking Productivity Metrics

In this episode, Dave and Jamison answer these questions:

1. I’m a manager on a Product team. I’ve been asked by upper management to measure “story points completed per developer per sprint” and display the results publicly each sprint to motivate lower-performing employees. I explained why, according to Scrum, I don’t think this is a good idea. But I think my explanations came across as me not wanting to make my team accountable for performance.

   For some context, I currently track productivity by reading daily updates, PRs, and tickets, from each developer.

   I worry that “story points” is easily game-able as a performance target, and will make the team want to modify the points after the fact to reflect actual time spent. Then story points will become a less useful tool for project planning.

   I’d like to satisfy the higher-up ask to measure productivity, but in a way that is good for the team, the company, and my career.

   Any thoughts on how to approach this?

2. A listener named Mike asks,

   I work for a company with 30 employees. Our CEO is trying to be our CTO by prompting all our issues to ChatGPT. This week we had a discussion about changes needed to comply with specific certifications requested by one of our customers. 15 minutes later I got an email containing a chatGPT conversation giving ‘advice’ that I debunked just 20 minutes beforehand. I have been vocal about my concerns of over-use of LLM’s before and think it’s dangerous for our CEO to keep sending large chunks of factually incorrect text across the org. He did finally stop talking about story point burn down because chatGPT told him it’s a bad metric though. So maybe this is salvageable?