속도를 넘어서 : 속도가 아닌 영향으로 엔지니어링 성공을 측정합니다

For many engineering teams, velocity—a measurement of effort expended by developers, usually as story points completed in a sprint—feels like the best way to measure output across stacks of projects and initiatives. But from the perspective of a leader who is tasked with bridging the gap between tech execution and business objectives, it doesn’t tell the full story. If the velocity is high, why aren’t business goals being met around revenue, retention, or sales?

“It’s not actually business impact,” Ben Matthews, Senior Director of Engineering at Stack Overflow, says in our latest episode of Leaders of Code. “To be clear, I’m still a fan of velocity as an introspective data point. That is not the goal, but it’s a way to maybe diagnose a team.”

When tech leaders look past output and towards impact, businesses flourish and teams become healthier. But if velocity is just a tool and not a goal, how do you measure real success for engineering teams? The answer lies in understanding the core objectives of the organization, and how engineering teams contribute to them. “How can we move beyond velocity and something like that and get to real business impact?” Dan Lines, co-founder and COO of LinearB, asks during the episode. “Our customer base and the people that I talk to, they’re on the hook for productivity. So I think the first thing that we need to do is decide what is real business impact.”

This article explores topics first shared by Ben Matthews and Dan Lines in the latest episode of Leaders of Codeall while velocity gets higherone of the five flawed productivity metricsStack Overflow blog postDeloitte reportLinearB Dev Interrupted PodcastMcKinseyaligned with industry standardsrecent EngSat surveyIn a thought experiment by Itamar Gilad