Ask HN: How do you measure eng team productivity?

I’m finding very little resource on this topic. However, it is paramount to follow it as a team grows or a company grows - I’ve known many companies whose developers effectively stopped developing anything of value, being burdened by bugs, bureaucracy, or poor relationships. To be precise, productivity is the measure of outputs over inputs. In the engineering world, outputs are usually value increments (the definition of which varies according to each team’s mission and expertise. They could be user stories for devs, models for data scientists, terraform changes for ops), and input is time. I would note that I don’t know whether to count maintenance tasks in or out (such as keeping versions up to date) or the output definition. However, anything that does not bring obvious value (bug fixing, refactoring) should be counted out of output in terms of productivity - don’t get me wrong, refactoring is useful and important, because when done well it will improve future productivity. The term “team” deserves some definition too. A team in my question has two attributes: - a common mission - size between 2 and 7 people

I’m looking for testimonies and knowledge: - how is productivity measured in your team if you’re an engineer? In different teams if you’re at a management level? Conversely, is it not measured and do you know why? - how is productivity measured in companies you know, either through firsthand experience or well-documented sources? (Company articles, books) - are you aware of research in this area?

On a last side note, I would count research displayed in Accelerate out of the productivity question. The DORA metrics don’t delve into the complex details of “what is value for my team” and focus on the release level. The books and research are great, but arguably not about engineering productivity.

I worked in a company who measured productivity by attributing a score based on the Fibonacci scale. But they were doing this when the feature was done.

By doing that, it was fairly easy to give a relevant score to each feature.

Engineering team was doing this to measure solely engineering productivity, but product team could do this as well to measure added value to the company.

By tracking the start/end date as well for each feature, you can then measure productivity at any time scale you want.

That’s very interesting, what is the score based on?

Why do you want to measure productivity?

You already know where you are. A measurement doesn’t help your team ship better or faster.

If you’re shipping product improvements at a regular cadence, and the customers are happy, then there’s no problem with productivity.

If you’re shipping poor quality, identify why and improve that.

If you’re shipping so slow that it’s negatively impacting customers, identify why and improve that.

Shoot me an email, I’d be happy to offer more perspective or advice.

Well, productivity measures how fast you deliver new value. Fixing a bug is about repairing value that you thought you had delivered but actually did not. Counting bugs as "value" would be double counting.