What Dashboards Don't Tell You

Are your team performance metrics telling you what you think they’re telling you? “You can’t improve what you can’t measure” is a sound rule of thumb, but it is leading us astray when it comes to understanding the health and productivity of engineering teams. Engineering managers spend hours analysing burndown charts, graphs of opened and closed PRs, and commit counts, hoping that they can debug their processes to remove blockers, increase productivity, and boost developer happiness. But these efforts are often fruitless and frustrating, because vanity metrics have permeated our dashboards. We have shiny quantitative data that look impressive as a line chart, but don’t give meaningful insight into system health. Learn how to spot vanity metrics in the wild, and learn what to measure instead, so you can create an environment where your engineers can excel.