I think it's pretty universal that project managers of all types across probably all industries are trained to care about metrics. It would be very, very unusual to have a project manager who doesn't show up and say, hey, where's the numbers? Is the numbers get better? Are they getting worse? How do we know we're succeeding? What's your measurement of success? That's an activity that I expect project managers in all industries to engage in. Many engineering managers are former engineers. They rose up from being engineers. And their training didn't include how do I define metrics? How do I act on metrics?
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