No matter how ubiquitous tech is in our daily lives, it bears repeating: The craft of code is still very, very, very young.
This means every engineering org is still figuring out how to make the most of the teams they have. Processes are still evolving. Management techniques are being picked up and dropped every couple of years. Workflow theories are being generated by developers in the weeds rather than established institutions.
Despite the changing nature of the industry, one of the few tried, tested ways of knowing your dev teams are working as well as they should be is metrics.
Case in point: Lessen.
A company designed to disrupt the way property managers connect with the professionals they need, Lessen’s entire existence depends on making sure that the tools, features, and software their customers rely on are actually being delivered.
That’s why Lessen’s CTO Chris Bee adopted LinearB, to make sure his team of disruptive developers was on track to change the industry in the way they were designed to.
LinearB is designed to focus on the right metrics
Unlike so many other ways to get developer metrics, LinearB has an opinion on what metrics actually matter.
DORA metrics are at the heart of what LinearB provides instantaneously. Why? Because those 4 metrics are the most proven measures of workflow health and pipeline efficiency.
“What I love more than anything is that LinearB is opinionated with the metrics it provides – the DORA framework,” says Chris. “I think it’s becoming the industry standard to understand the health of your teams, deployment cycles, and release times.”
Not only does having instant access to the right metrics make you look good, it makes teams feel good. “I think these metrics give us confidence in where we’re headed, how efficient the team is operating, how well our development cycle is, and if we’re responding to issues & errors.”
But LinearB doesn’t stop at DORA – and we understand that effectively using DORA metrics means going beyond them.
Metrics are focused on teams, not individuals
Another sign LinearB was designed by developers and not management consultants?We focus on evaluating the metrics of teams, not just individual developers – we’re explicitly against stack ranking your developers.
Leveraging our Teams view has been key for so many companies, including Lessen, to figure out which parts of their engineering org are on track, which ones need improvement and which ones need to be refactored.
“I would say a key piece of how we use LinearB is to evaluate teams’ productivity and the overall performance as a group,” says Chris. “We can do comparisons at the leadership level in terms of how the teams are performing. It gives us a centralized approach to measure the effectiveness. Without that, you’re sort of left to your own devices and interpretations.”
Build growth goals you can achieve
When you’re looking to disrupt an industry like Lessen, growth comes fast or it doesn’t come. That’s why scaling, metrics, and LinearB go hand-in-hand.
First, with the right metrics, you can bring structure and consistency in decisions around hypergrowth.
“We’ve been hiring multiple people every week, building new teams, and constantly changing their structure/makeup. What we found is that metrics do tend to follow similar patterns of what we would expect from the overall product.”
Second, with the right metrics enabling visibility, you can set goals and make the decisions you need to achieve them. With LinearB’s Team Goals feature organizations like Lessen can go beyond simple visibility, and actually set and achieve goals to improve engineering effeciency.
“The future is really about setting goals around some of the metrics. Now that we’ve got the teams a little more established, we’re holding ourselves more accountable to those goals/metrics and how they’re incorporated into our day-to-day,” said Chris.
Take control of your team’s software development metrics today…
If you have a dev team, you have metrics… you just don’t see them yet. Lessen isn’t alone in improving their engineering team by taking control of their metrics. Over 80% of companies see improvements in under 120 days after adopting LinearB. Learn more about how your company can be next.
