Engineering leaders need concrete ways to gauge impact beyond velocity metrics; this piece shares real company measures-press releases, billable features, competitive advantages, and project counts-and offers a framework for tracking big bets, experiments, and fires.
Measuring engineering impact is more than counting lead time or failure rate. The article argues that impact must be tied to business outcomes, citing Amazon's press releases, Square's billable features, Gusto's competitive advantages, and Uber's shipped projects as concrete, hard-to-game signals that align engineering work with growth goals.
These measures work because they are simple to report, they reinforce an innovation mindset, and they resist manipulation when senior leaders stay involved. The author adds that any organization with more than one management layer should adopt a lightweight version of these metrics to avoid drifting into efficiency-only thinking.
At Calm Engineering the author pilots a richer set: big-bet features, experiment outcomes, fire counts, and technical investments. While this list is longer, it mirrors the same principle-track outcomes that matter to the business while watching for negative side effects like incidents.
The piece also reflects on infrastructure teams, noting that traditional impact metrics (user adoption, reliability, cost) often clash with global compliance demands. The takeaway for leaders is to pick a handful of clear, business-oriented signals and use them to steer both product and platform engineering toward real value.
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