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Engineering Metrics: What Matters

Not all metrics are created equal. In the realm of engineering metrics, what you measure should align with what truly matters to your organization’s success. This page provides an overview of the types of metrics that engineering leaders find most valuable, and how to ensure your metrics program stays focused on impact and business alignment.

Frameworks and Categories: Over the years, several frameworks have emerged to categorize engineering metrics. One widely adopted set is the DORA metrics, which focus on software delivery performance (more on DORA in the subpage). But engineering work is multifaceted, and leaders often track metrics across multiple categories:

  • Velocity and Throughput Metrics: How fast are we delivering? This includes DORA’s Deployment Frequency and Lead Time for Changes, as well as related measures like cycle time (time from work start to release) or story completion rate. These metrics fall under the umbrella of process or productivity metrics – they gauge the efficiency of development workflows.

  • Quality and Stability Metrics: Are we delivering reliably? DORA’s Change Failure Rate and MTTR (Mean Time to Recovery) live here, alongside things like test coverage, and incident counts. These ensure speed isn’t coming at the expense of stability. They align with product metrics in the sense of product quality, and operational metrics for reliability.

  • People and Satisfaction Metrics: How are our engineers doing? These might include developer satisfaction scores, eNPS (employee Net Promoter Score) for engineers, onboarding duration for new hires, and attrition rates. Often considered people or team health metrics, they reveal morale, engagement, and team sustainability.

  • Project and Delivery Metrics: Are we on track and using resources wisely? Here you have things like predictability (planned vs. done work), burndown charts, sprint velocity (when used carefully), and even cost metrics (like cloud spend per feature or cost of delay). These intersect with project management and can tie engineering output back to business outcomes (like features delivered per quarter, etc.).

  • Compliance and Standardization Metrics: Are we following best practices and standards? For example, percentage of services with a documented owner, coverage of monitoring on services, security scan compliance. These could be considered standards-based metrics, ensuring engineering work meets certain governance criteria.

It’s easy to be overwhelmed by metrics. The key is to recognize that metrics are a means to an end, not an end in themselves. So, what end do we care about?
Generally: improving engineering outcomes that matter to the business. For most organizations, that means faster delivery of value, higher quality and stability, happier teams, and ultimately satisfied customers.

Business Alignment: A good litmus test for any metric is to ask, “If this metric changes, does someone outside of engineering care?” Take Deployment Frequency – an exec might care because faster deployments (when done right) mean faster time to market, which can drive revenue or competitive advantage. Developer satisfaction – a CEO might care indirectly, since unhappy developers lead to turnover and slowed innovation. If you struggle to find a narrative for why a metric matters beyond the engineering department, it might be a vanity metric. It’s often helpful to tie engineering metrics to broader KPIs or OKRs. For example, if a company OKR is to improve customer retention, engineering might support that with metrics on incident response times (to improve uptime) and feature flow (to deliver promised enhancements on schedule), both of which clearly connect to customer experience. In Port, you can even map scorecards to business objectives, making this linkage explicit.

Focus on Key Metrics: Especially at the start, it’s wise to focus on a small, balanced set of metrics that cover multiple dimensions. A classic recommendation is to implement DORA metrics for a baseline view of speed and stability – they’re research-backed and give you a clear initial benchmark. Then add one or two metrics around developer sentiment or team health (to gauge how sustainable your pace is). Finally, include a metric or two related to any critical engineering initiative or pain point unique to your context – for instance, if technical debt is a big issue, maybe track refactor efforts or code churn; if hiring/onboarding is a focus, track onboarding ramp time. By limiting the set, you ensure clarity. Each metric should tell a story and provoke a conversation about improvement, rather than just being a number on a slide.

Continuous Improvement over Targets: It’s worth reinforcing that engineering metrics are most powerful when used for continuous improvement, not fixed targets. Setting reasonable goals or working agreements (e.g., “We strive to keep MTTR under 1 hour” or “PR review turnaround within 24 hours”) can motivate and align teams. But the real point is to use metrics to identify trends and outliers, discuss them in retrospectives or ops reviews, and experiment with changes. Metrics should feed a learning process. For example, if deployment frequency is lower than desired, dig into why – is it due to flaky tests, or maybe batching of work? Then try a solution (like more parallelization or smaller batch sizes) and see if the metric responds. This iterative approach keeps the focus on improvement rather than judgment.

Leveraging Port for Metrics that Matter: Finally, Port’s Engineering360 is designed to help focus on what matters by enabling custom dashboards and scorecards for the metrics you choose, not just a predetermined set. You might use our templates for DORA, but you’ll also define what your organization cares about. By having all relevant metrics in your portal, you can see the big picture: how process metrics (like DORA) intersect with people metrics (like survey results) and standards metrics (like compliance percentages).

In short, measure what matters, and matter to what you measure. By focusing on meaningful engineering metrics, aligned to business outcomes and team well-being, you set the stage for impactful improvements.