Measures of engineering impact

#27 – March 08, 2021

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Measures of engineering impact are not Accelerate’s measures of developer productivity: lead time, batch size, failure rate, and time to revert. Those measures support understanding and optimizing your development process but aren’t very effective at grading business impact.

In February 2012 I began working for a new company. On my first day, I deployed to production. I was lost for words. It felt like magic. Every day was the same: pick the highest priority item, implement it, and then deploy to production immediately. After 6 months, I was still pinching myself.

What does it mean to lead when you don’t have coercive power to get your way?

When your company is scaling rapidly due to product market fit, one of the biggest impediments (or boosters) to growth will turn out to be the composition of your executive team.

A common refrain that we hear about performance reviews is that they shouldn’t contain any surprises. Once in a blue moon, a manager has given repeated, documented, concrete and specific feedback and their report hasn’t noticed or absorbed it. This is incredibly rare.

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