Engineering KPIs

In a previous blog post I talked about the dangers of using ‘velocity’ as a KPI for Engineering, but what are good alternatives?

I propose that the following perennial KPIs measure a lot of what matter about Engineering success (in a SaaS/web app environment):

• Uptime
• Mean Time To Discover
• Mean Time To Resolution
• Deploy Duration
• Rollback Duration
• Ticket Cycle Time
• Build and Automated Test Duration
• Number of Deploys Per Unit of Time
• Incoming Production Defect Count Per Unit of Time

The important thing is that these are KPIs that are wholly or largely in Engineering’s control, and are relevant regardless of what is being delivered.

As with any metric, they don’t tell the full story about underlying causes, but :

• are easy to collect
• are leading indicators of potential problems
• have material business impact if they trend in the wrong direction

Note that these are separate from, and parallel to, project delivery and OKR metrics. Engineering might be great at driving the KPIs above but you may not be making impactful updates to your products. It’s important to look at Product impact as well.