Performance Management for Beginners

What Gets Measured Gets Optimized For

I’ve read a bunch of management books and articles on how best to measure the performance of engineering teams and individuals, and I still don’t really have a clue how best to do it. Or even if it should be done.

Measuring tasks completed doesn’t make much sense because some tasks take longer to complete than others. Some are new features that can only be broken down so small and take many days to complete, while others are documentation typo fixes that take minutes. We could tally up the points for these completed tasks, but points are often inaccurate and we follow a Kanban workflow, so we don’t concern ourselves with points.

Measuring the impact of tasks completed sounds great in practice, but that impact can take months or years to be realized and measured. And how do you measure the impact of a task that was completed by a team? Or a task that was completed by an individual that was only possible because of the work of another individual?

I could measure the number of change requests and severity of critical feedback in pull requests, but something about that seems petty to me. I don’t want to create a culture of fear where people are afraid to make mistakes. I want people to feel comfortable making mistakes and learning from them.

And then I start to wonder why I feel the need to measure individual performance in the first place. Nobody is asking me about the performance of individual members of my team. Nobody is asking me why developer X is completing more tasks than developer Y. In this economy, I can’t justify adding another member to my team, so it’s not about justifying the need for more people.

I know who my top performers are and I know who has the most room to grow, so it’s not about identifying who needs help.

I just feel this need to prove the value of my team and the individuals on it as proof of return on investment. I want to be able to say “I’m paying this person X dollars and they are providing Y dollars of value to the company.” Because what gets measured gets added to the list of success stories, and when the time comes to ask for more resources, I want to be able to point to this return on investment.