My journey in the technical field has taken me from hands-on software engineering to the CTO’s role. In my monthly and quarterly routines at my current position, I regularly evaluate the efficiency of contributors: engineers, designers, QA, DevOps, and cross-functional teams overall. And over time, I’ve come to a clear conclusion: traditional engineering metrics like velocity, story points, or arguably lines of code can fail to capture the bigger picture. They are not inherently bad, but can drive wrong results, and their value depends entirely on how we use them.
These metrics only make sense when framed against real outcomes, such as customer value delivered, time-to-market improvements, system stability, or cost efficiency. They can be incredibly insightful when used tactically to diagnose patterns, identify bottlenecks, or track improvements within a team. However, as strategic indicators, they can often mislead and derail the process.