- How can we ensure that engineering work is delivering business impact?
- EEBO metrics are crucial because they bridge the gap between engineering activities and their tangible business impact.
- They establish a direct and measurable connection between the work of engineers and the financial outcome.
- By using EEBO metrics, organizations can: justify engineering investments, by demonstrating the ROI of engineering efforts; align engineering with business goals — ensuring engineering teams are working on projects that directly contribute to business objectives; and make data-driven decisions by using metrics to inform strategic choices and resource allocation.
- DORA metrics are internal to an engineering organization and focus primarily on software delivery performance. EEBO metrics, meanwhile, are intended to be external to engineering and focus instead on business impact.
Bridging the gap between engineering work and business impact is challenging because of a variety of factors.
- Traditional metrics often prioritize activity over value. While useful for tracking engineering output, metrics like velocity and availability can mislead when used as the sole measure of success.
- These activity-focused metrics cannot capture the impact of engineering efforts on tangible business outcomes like customer satisfaction, revenue growth, or market share.
- There's a natural tendency to focus on easily measurable metrics rather than meaningful ones. When pressured to show progress, engineering teams may rely on readily available data points that don't reflect the true value of their work, creating "dysfunctional metrics" that create a false sense of accomplishment and obscure areas which need improvement.
- Organizational silos and a lack of shared understanding between engineering and business stakeholders further exacerbate the challenge.
- Even well-intentioned frameworks like OKRs, while valuable for setting objectives, often lack a robust mechanism for directly correlating engineering excellence practices to business outcomes. This can lead to engineering tasks, especially those related to non-functional requirements, being deprioritized or inadequately resourced.
- Recognizing the subjective nature of "value" is key to understanding the artistry involved in metric selection. To understand the artistry involved in metric selection, one must recognize the subjective nature of "value" and interpret and judge the translation of activity metrics like lines of code or deployment frequency. For instance, a high deployment frequency, while positive, might not generate business value if the deployed features do not align with customer needs or market demands.
- The shift from readily available "activity metrics" to carefully chosen "fitness metrics." This shift requires a nuanced understanding of the organization's goals, context, and desired outcomes, moving beyond simply measuring what's easy to measure. Determining the most relevant fitness metrics, such as those related to customer effort score or time to market, needs a deep understanding of the interplay between engineering work and business impact.
- Successfully implementing EEBO metrics relies heavily on effective storytelling and narrative-building. To effectively communicate the value of engineering excellence to stakeholders, it is necessary to craft a compelling narrative, even with robust data and well-defined metrics. This involves translating technical jargon into relatable language, highlighting the connection between engineering efforts and business outcomes, and presenting the information in a clear and engaging manner.
Therefore, while the science of metrics lies in their objective measurement and analysis, the art emerges in the subjective processes of:
- Discerning valuable metrics from those that are merely measurable.
- Framing technical achievements within the context of business impact.
- Communicating insights in a way that resonates with stakeholders and drives action.