Engineering metrics that matter (and the vanity ones to drop)

The engineering metrics worth tracking measure outcomes and flow at the team level — throughput, cycle time, rework and effort by content. The ones to drop measure individual activity — lines of code, commit counts, hours online — because they're gamed the moment they're watched and they punish good engineering. Here's how to tell them apart.

Metrics that matter

• Throughput — how much reaches 'done', tracked for the team, not ranked per person.
• Cycle time (avg + p90) — how long work takes from started to shipped; the clearest flow signal.
• Rework — reopens and QA bounce-backs; a cheap, honest quality proxy.
• Effort by content — inferred from what changed and its type, discounting generated dumps.
• Sustainable pace — after-hours creep and PTO actually taken, to catch burnout early.

Vanity metrics to drop

• Lines of code — rewards bloat, punishes deletion and surgical fixes.
• Commit count — trivially gamed by committing more often.
• Hours online / activity tracking — measures presence, not output, and erodes trust.
• Individual leaderboards — turn a team into a competition and hide collaboration.

The rule that keeps metrics healthy

Measure the team, let everyone see their own numbers, and treat every metric as a prompt for a conversation — never the sole basis for a performance decision. A metric you couldn't show the whole team without causing fear is the wrong metric.

truelo is built on exactly this: team-level throughput, cycle time and content-based effort, with no stack-ranking and full self-visibility.