Thanks for coming! This site is full of ideas for what you can measure and how you can measure it. Before we get into that, Let’s start with the “why”.
The first time I ever thought about using data to help run my team was in 2015. The start-up I worked for was growing fast, and overnight (it felt like) I went from leading a single team of 6 devs to leading 5 teams with 50+ devs as VP of Engineering.
I had no experience dealing with an organization of that size. The processes that worked for us when we were smaller weren’t scaling. I knew I needed to be doing more to help my team but I wasn’t sure what.
I dove head first into the problem by talking to every expert I could find. Other VPs of Engineering, agile consultants, start-up investors – anyone who could offer a clue about what scaling successfully looked like. They all said the same thing, you need data to lead a rapidly growing dev team.
So I reassigned one of our data engineers to do nothing other than compile internal data about how our team worked. I learned a lot and made a ton of mistakes like focusing on individual performance metrics. Spoiler alert: don’t do that! And eventually I came up with a runbook that we now use at LinearB to run a data-driven development organization. Everything I learned and everything we use today is here in this web site. I hope it helps.
Thanks for coming,