How do you involve and empower your engineering team in metrics design?

1 Understand the purpose and context of metrics

Before you start designing metrics, it's important to have a clear understanding of why you need them and how they fit into your team's goals, strategy, and context. Metrics should be aligned with your team's vision, mission, and values, as well as the expectations and feedback of stakeholders, customers, and users. Additionally, metrics should reflect the specific challenges, opportunities, and constraints of your team's domain, technology, and environment. To better understand the purpose and context of metrics, consider asking yourself and your team questions such as: what are the key problems or opportunities we are trying to solve or seize? What are the desired outcomes or impacts we want to achieve or create? How do we measure our progress and success towards those outcomes or impacts? What are the assumptions, hypotheses, or risks we need to validate or mitigate? What external and internal factors influence or affect our performance and quality? How do we communicate and demonstrate our value and contribution to stakeholders, customers, and users?

2 Involve your engineers in metrics design

Involving your engineers in the process of designing metrics is an effective way to ensure that they are relevant, meaningful, and actionable for your team. Your engineers have the most knowledge and experience related to the technical aspects of your team's work, so their input can help you identify and define the most appropriate metrics. Furthermore, involving them in metrics design will increase their ownership, engagement, and motivation to use and improve the metrics. It will also foster a culture of collaboration, transparency, and learning within your team. To avoid potential pitfalls, such as choosing metrics that are too vague or complex, you can use various methods and tools like brainstorming sessions, surveys, prototyping, testing, reviews, retrospectives, or feedback loops.

3 Empower your engineers to use and improve metrics

Empowering your engineers to use and improve engineering metrics is an important part of design. Involve them in defining, designing, and using the metrics. Provide them with the necessary tools, resources, and support to collect, analyze, and visualize the metrics. Encourage your engineers to use the metrics as a guide rather than a goal and to focus on the underlying causes and effects. Enable them to suggest and implement changes or improvements based on their observations, experiences, and feedback. For example, give them autonomy to add or modify metrics or propose initiatives that can improve the metrics.

4 Communicate and align your metrics with your stakeholders

An essential part of engineering metrics design is to communicate and align your metrics with your stakeholders, such as managers, peers, customers, or users. Your metrics should be not only relevant and meaningful to engineers, but also to your stakeholders. To communicate and align your metrics with them, explain and justify the purpose, value, and logic of your metrics in relation to your team's goals. Listen and respond to their feedback on your metrics. Also, collaborate with them to ensure that your metrics are consistent and compatible with their metrics. You can use stories, examples, surveys, interviews, meetings, frameworks, standards, or agreements to illustrate how your metrics measure and improve performance and quality. Additionally, this will help you harmonize your metrics with theirs while avoiding conflicts or discrepancies.

5 Here’s what else to consider

This is a space to share examples, stories, or insights that don’t fit into any of the previous sections. What else would you like to add?