Measures of engineering impact

Overview
The post explores the challenge of measuring engineering impact beyond traditional developer productivity metrics such as lead time, batch size, failure rate, and time to revert. It presents real-world impact measures used by companies like Amazon, Square, Gusto, and Uber, and shares the author's own framework used at Calm Engineering.

Key Takeaways

• Simple, repeatable metrics (e.g., press releases, billable features, shipped projects) are more effective for communicating impact.
• Impact measures should align with the organization's focus on innovation and be difficult to game.
• A balanced set of metrics can include big bets, experiments, incident counts, and technical investments.
• Measuring infrastructure impact requires different approaches, often involving reliability and investment sizing.

Who Would Benefit

• Engineering managers seeking ways to quantify team contribution to business goals.
• Senior leaders looking for high-level impact dashboards.
• Technical leads wanting a framework to track experiments, big bets, and technical debt reduction.
• Organizations transitioning from pure efficiency metrics to business impact metrics.

Frameworks and Methodologies

• Impact measurement frameworks based on observable business outcomes.
• Engineering strategy alignment with measurable goals.
• Reliability and infrastructure investment sizing methods.