In this segment of the talk, the speaker emphasizes the pitfalls of focusing on a single metric, which can lead teams to game the system and neglect other important work. To counter this, they advocate for strategically selecting a balanced set of metrics aligned with business objectives and drawing on multiple data sources—Jira reports, Jellyfish, and GitLab—to gain a comprehensive view of both visible and hidden work. The speaker stresses the importance of real‑time, accessible data for all team members, enabling transparent, data‑driven conversations with executives and preventing biased or uninformed decisions. They also warn against relying on opaque, custom reports whose provenance is unclear, underscoring the need for transparency in a data‑driven culture.
Chapters
Avoid gaming the system. So I think I should tell you guys, I don't think anyone games the system on purpose, right? This should, this should say avoid playing yourself basically by focusing on one metric or data source. When you do that, you incentivize the teams to hit that, hit that number, and they will hit it at the expense of other really important things. So it's very important to create that healthy tension in the metrics that you're monitoring and select those metrics strategically to your business objectives. Jellyfish was awesome for me personally, because I— my go-to is those Jira reports. If teams don't want more items going into the backlog than coming out of it, they'll just not put them in the backlog. That doesn't mean the work doesn't exist, right? But I can see, because that's balanced with what we're focused on, and for us, GitLab, I can— there's not hidden work, right? Like, we're all looking at the same data. Anyway, so use data from multiple dimensions and types. Go read the Space of Developer Productivity. Having the data at your fingertips in real time. I know we all want to do the right thing for the business, but we are all very busy, and decisions sometimes happen very quickly, especially in the executive circle. So, it's very easy for an executive to say, "Hey, you guys, it looks like you've got 7 people on DevOps out of 50 people. That's too many. Take half of those, put them on product. Boom, problem solved." Right? That's a terrible decision. But we need to be able to have an honest conversation about that immediately in real time. Everybody at Avik has access to Jellyfish, right? We're all looking at the same data. It's a simple click to see what are those 7 DevOps engineers working on? Is any of that stuff we could not do, right? That's a very— it's just so much easier when you have data at your fingertips in real time. And making that data accessible to everyone prevents using biased data to drive decisions. So, We pride ourselves on being a data-driven company, but if that data comes from a custom report that somebody wrote that you can't see the source of, you could be making decisions based on some questionable data. So, so for us, like those three things have been, have been key. [MUSIC] [MUSIC]
