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Breaking Free from the Build Trap: Delivering Meaningful Outcomes

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10 min read

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This article is the final part of a series on linking software engineering to business success. If you missed the earlier articles, start here.

This Article at a Glance

This article explores how engineering teams can escape the “build trap” and move beyond a feature factory mindset by focusing on outcomes instead of outputs. It highlights the pitfalls of the build trap, the value of starting with outcomes, fostering accountability and alignment, and ensuring successful delivery. Aimed at technology leaders, Product Managers, and teams, it challenges them to adopt a mindset centered on meaningful outcomes—driving engagement, alignment, and impactful business results.

From Speed to Meaningful Value

Picture this: you’re leading a team of talented developers, launching features rapidly, but customer satisfaction isn’t improving, and the business impact is unclear. This happens when teams focus too much on output, a common issue in traditional project-based management. Switching to a product operating model and applying Value Stream Management can break this cycle. These approaches focus on outcomes instead of outputs, ensuring every effort is tied to measurable business value.

As a senior technology leader, I’ve been there. Early in my career, I focused on operational efficiency and rapid feedback, confident that speed and volume would drive success. But I learned the hard way: speed alone doesn’t guarantee value.

This realization highlighted a critical gap—the need for realization. Efficiently delivering work is only part of the puzzle; the priority must be ensuring that every effort contributes meaningful outcomes for both customers and the business.

To close this gap, I began asking:

  • What outcomes do we expect, how will we measure success, and what can we learn from the results?

By adopting value stream management (VSM) and objectives and key results (OKRs), we created a clear link between work and impact. VSM revealed how work flows through teams and where value is created, while OKRs provided a framework for aligning team goals with organizational priorities.

Escaping the build trap isn’t just about faster delivery—it’s about rethinking success. When efforts are tied to measurable results, teams and leaders work with clarity, purpose, and trust, transforming delivery into meaningful value for the business and its customers.

Defining Outcomes at Every Level

Anticipated Outcomes for Epics

In Agile software development, an initiative is a large, highest-level body of work representing a significant feature or functionality too extensive for a single sprint. Initiatives usually have Epics defined to support a piece of the Initiative. Defining anticipated outcomes for each Initiative or epic clarifies the value being delivered, the behavior being changed, and how success will be measured. This approach helps teams see their work’s purpose and anticipated impact and how it aligns with organizational goals, as well as create team-level OKRs within their focus areas.

Questions to define Initiative or Epic level outcomes:

  1. What problem are we solving, what behavior are we changing, or what opportunity are we addressing?
  2. What results do we expect, and how will we measure them?
  3. What metrics will define success?
  4. How will we close the loop by learning from actual outcomes?

Example: An initiative aimed at improving onboarding might define success metrics like:

  • Increasing customer retention by 10% within 30 days.
  • Reducing onboarding-related support tickets by 15%.
  • Receiving positive feedback from customer satisfaction surveys.

By defining these outcomes, teams can create Key Results that align with broader organizational objectives, ensuring their efforts directly support larger goals. These key results can become the objectives of supporting epics.

Outcomes-Driven Iterations

Initiatives or Epics provide the overarching product change or improvement, while sprints should center on value-driven outcomes, not merely task completion. Traditionally, sprints have prioritized finishing backlog tasks. However, by integrating Value Stream Management with a product operating model, the focus shifts toward delivering meaningful value. Instead of measuring success by completed tasks, sprints are now about achieving impactful results aligned with value streams. This approach ensures that every iteration targets tangible customer and business results.

Teams should define sprint goals based on outcomes, not tasks.

Example: “Enhance system performance by improving response times by 5%” (outcome) versus “Complete three refactoring tickets” (task).

This mindset shifts how teams view their work:

  1. Collaboration over individual output: Team members who finish early should check if the sprint goal has been met and help others achieve it.
  2. Focus on shared success: Success is measured by achieving the outcome, not individual task completion.

When iteration goals align with epic outcomes, teams focus on delivering meaningful value at every level of work.

OKRs, focus on organization alignment

OKRs are essential for helping teams break free from the build trap by connecting their efforts to impactful outcomes. By focusing on work (features, technical debt, defects, and risks) within the team’s scope or control, OKRs align the team’s work with customer needs and organizational objectives. This alignment transforms sprints, epics, and initiatives from mere tasks into measurable milestones that drive meaningful business results.

OKRs bridge the gap between your team’s efforts and the outcomes that truly matter, encouraging a focus on value rather than speed. This mindset shift fosters intentional work and delivers impactful results.

To develop a team-level OKR from a parent key result, you can use a method known as explicit alignment or cascading. This process transforms a higher-level key result into a focused objective for your team, ensuring clear alignment and purpose. Here’s an effective way to approach it:

  1. Define your desired outcome and ensure it aligns with a relevant Parent Key Result:
    Begin by reviewing the overarching OKRs at the company or department level. Identify a key result that aligns with your team’s responsibilities and can be directly influenced within your team’s scope.
  2. Transform the Key Result into an Objective:
    Reframe the parent key result as a clear objective for your team (the expected outcome). This objective will serve as the central focus of their efforts.
  3. Develop Supporting Key Results:
    Create 3-5 key results to help your team achieve this new objective. These should be specific, measurable, and aligned with the overall goal or outcome.
  4. Ensure Alignment:
    Make sure your team’s OKRs align with and support the higher-level objective they are based on. Set clear targets for each key result by defining what success looks like for your team about the parent key result. This will help keep your team focused and guide their efforts toward achieving the desired outcome.

Note: Escaping the build trap requires more than focusing on outcomes—it demands a structural shift to a product operating model. By aligning teams with specific products and value streams, organizations create an environment where teams are not just delivering features but owning the evolution of outcomes over time. This model encourages accountability and allows teams to iteratively refine their work, fostering alignment with customer needs and organizational goals. It also reduces handoffs and inefficiencies, enabling teams to focus on continuous delivery and improvement.

Accountability and Team Alignment

The Role of Product Managers

A strong product team is defined by the trust and partnership between engineers and their Product Manager—someone engineers would confidently “go to bat for.” To build this trust, Product Managers must prioritize technical debt, risks, and defects alongside new features, acknowledging their critical role in delivering a high-quality product.

Product Managers must also actively engage as part of the team. Their role involves:

  • Collaborating on priorities.
  • Participating in discussions.
  • Supporting the shared goal of delivering value to customers.

Ownership

Every outcome or team-level OKR needs a clear owner—someone who is accountable for defining, prioritizing, and ensuring its achievement. In Agile teams, this often means Product Managers own the outcomes tied to customer-facing features, while technical leads take responsibility for outcomes related to technical debt, scalability, or system performance. For example:

  • A Product Manager might own the outcome of increasing user retention by 10% through a new onboarding feature, ensuring the team understands the goal and tracks metrics like retention or onboarding completion rates.
  • A Technical Lead might own the outcome of reducing downtime by 15% by addressing key infrastructure improvements, ensuring technical debt is addressed in a way that aligns with broader organizational goals.

Ownership ensures clarity and accountability, preventing outcomes from falling through the cracks or becoming vague aspirations. The owner is also responsible for closing the loop—documenting the actual outcomes, sharing them with stakeholders, and reflecting on whether the actual outcomes were achieved.

Prioritizing by Anticipated Outcome or Impact

There’s always more work than resources. Your team is limited by the people you There’s always more work than resources. Your team is limited by the people you have and the time available. Capacity limits make it essential to prioritize based on outcomes. When new tasks arise, check if they align with your current objectives or OKRs. Don’t hesitate to push back if they don’t contribute to key objectives. Ask yourself:

  • Does this work align with our top priorities? If not, why should it take precedence?
  • What will we remove or deprioritize to maintain focus if we take on this work?
  • How does this impact our ability to achieve current targets and objectives?

When new work aligns with your objectives or introduces a higher-priority goal, something else must be deprioritized to make room. Collaborate as a team to identify and remove the lowest-priority work and communicate the updated goals or OKRs.

Prioritizing work based on anticipated return on investment (ROI) and anticipated outcomes ensures that engineering efforts focus on initiatives with the greatest potential for business impact. This approach balances short-term needs with long-term value creation, guiding teams to deliver meaningful results.

By recognizing capacity constraints and ensuring all stakeholders understand new requests’ significance and expected impact, teams can align their efforts with expected outcomes and ROI. This approach fosters collaboration, accountability, and a shared commitment to purposeful progress among Product Managers, engineers, and stakeholders.

Aligning Incentives

Teams must recognize the tensions created by differing role incentives:

  • Product Managers are often rewarded for growth and feature delivery.
  • Engineers focus on quality, performance, and resilience.

These priorities can clash, but alignment is achievable when both roles focus on shared outcomes. Product Managers who treat technical debt, quality, and security as essential aspects of the product—not competing concerns—foster trust and collaboration within their teams.

Great engineers go beyond technical skills—they understand the product and its goals. They ask thoughtful questions to ensure their work meets customer and business needs. This understanding helps them propose pragmatic solutions, such as quickly delivering 80% of the value while planning to address the remaining 20% later. By balancing speed and quality, engineers with a product mindset help their teams avoid becoming a “feature factory” that builds without considering impact or value.

When teams hold all members—particularly Product Managers responsible for features—accountable for defining outcomes, measuring success, and closing the feedback loop, they achieve greater clarity and alignment. This accountability drives purposeful work, encourages shared ownership, and links meaningful outcomes directly to business goals.es, measuring success, and closing the feedback loop, they achieve greater clarity and alignment. This accountability drives purposeful work, encourages shared ownership, and links meaningful outcomes directly to business goals.

Closing the Loop

I am a huge fan of “closing the loop” or sharing the outcome of the team’s efforts with the team and organization. Success isn’t just about finishing tasks; it’s about creating meaningful results. Instead of focusing on whether something is “done,” the impact measures real success: Did our work lead to an apparent, positive, and measurable change in customer behavior? Closing the loop is a key part of this process, and Product Managers and technical leads need to prioritize it to achieve lasting outcomes.

Although it may take weeks, months, or longer to receive the data or feedback, documenting the actual outcomes—whether in the Initiative, Epic, or both—is essential to show how the team performed. Metrics like customer engagement, retention, or efficiency gains help determine if the work delivered its intended value. For instance, if a new feature was meant to reduce churn, tracking churn rate, customer feedback, or increased product usage can confirm if the goal was met. Without this step, teams lose an essential chance to learn from their work. It shows how well the team met its objectives, helps improve future decisions, and ensures continuous growth.

Incorporating “closing the loop” into workflows helps Product Managers and technical leads gain actionable insights from every project. It ensures teams receive feedback on their work, promoting accountability, alignment, and constructive improvement. This approach keeps the focus on achieving clear outcomes and measurable success.

From Delivery to Realization

We’re enhancing team performance and operational efficiency by adopting a Product Operating Model and incorporating Value Stream Management (VSM) and Objectives and Key Results (OKRs) into our processes. Unlike projects with a defined end date, products follow a lifecycle—we’re not finished until the product is retired. This approach allows us to align teams to products and continuously deliver updates and improvements throughout a product’s lifecycle.

Value Stream Management (VSM) enables us to visualize the entire flow of value delivery, helping us identify and address bottlenecks and inefficiencies. Meanwhile, OKRs provide a structured framework for setting and tracking team goals, ensuring alignment with the organization’s broader strategic objectives. Together, these tools drive focus, clarity, and measurable progress in delivering value to our customers.

Integrating these practices is transforming our culture. Success is no longer measured by speed or output alone—it’s defined by the value delivered. These practices empower teams to recognize their impact, align with shared goals, and clearly demonstrate how their efforts drive business performance.

Lead With Outcomes

The time for teams to focus on both delivery and realization is now.

Steps to transform your teams:

  1. Define outcomes first: Start every epic, sprint, and initiative with clear, measurable outcomes.
  2. Hold teams accountable: Ensure product managers and engineers align with outcomes, not just output.
  3. Close the loop: Measure actual results, share insights with the team, and learn from every outcome through retrospectives.

When teams align on outcomes and focus on delivering impactful value, they move beyond simply following orders. They gain clarity on their purpose and unlock their full potential. We can create products that provide meaningful customer value while demonstrating clear contributions to organizational success.

Let’s lead with expected outcomes and break free from the build trap—together.

Series Summary

  1. Profitable Engineering: Linking Software Engineering to Business Results

Related Posts: Metrics and Team Efficiency

Poking Holes

I invite your perspective on my posts. What are your thoughts?.

Let’s talk: [email protected]

Transforming Engineering: From Cost Center to Strategic Partner

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7 min read

This article is the second in a three-part series exploring how software engineering can deliver measurable business value. If you missed the first article, start here.

A Leadership Epiphany

At the end of 2024, I reached a key moment in my career, reflecting on almost 30 years in technology leadership. In December, I published an article titled Crossroads: 2024 Reflections on Leadership, Legacy, and Modern Practices. The article explores my experiences with digital transformation, how leadership has evolved, and the changing role of technology in organizations.

The article covered key moments in my career, including my shift from improving engineering efficiency to focusing on delivering outcomes. It shared lessons I’ve learned about balancing workflow with value and the importance of aligning engineering efforts with organizational goals.

This article builds on those reflections, incorporating feedback and self-assessment to share the lessons I’ve learned and the changes I’ve made. It focuses on one key piece of feedback that changed how I approach leadership. My organization enrolled me and other senior leaders in a coaching program called The Extraordinary Leader. The program offered me a comprehensive 360-degree leadership assessment, which was both insightful and humbling. The results affirmed my commitment to a people-first leadership approach and my effort to develop my style. However, one piece of feedback stood out above the rest: “You should focus more on driving business results.”

At first, the feedback stung. We had spent years spearheading digital transformation initiatives—adopting Agile, DevOps, and Value Stream Management (VSM)—to improve operational efficiency, agility, and speed to market. These efforts enabled us to scale from $10 million to $110 million in revenue. Yet, it became clear that while our technology work was essential, we hadn’t effectively communicated its impact on the organization’s bottom line. My sales, marketing, and product peers had explicit metrics like revenue targets and customer growth, but engineering lacked a direct narrative linking its efforts to these outcomes.

We adopted Value Stream Management to bridge this gap and transitioned to a product operating model. VSM provided clear visibility into engineering workflows, from ideation to delivering measurable value, while the product operating model aligned teams with specific products or value streams. This shift empowered teams to understand the customer and business needs they support, iteratively improving outcomes over the product lifecycle. By focusing on products rather than temporary projects, teams developed subject matter expertise, drove innovation, and wholly owned their results, transforming engineering from a cost center into a strategic partner.

This realization led to a profound reflection on my leadership approach. While I had focused heavily on flow—ensuring work moved efficiently from idea to delivery—I hadn’t emphasized value realization: the tangible business impact of our efforts. This gap became a call to action: to redefine how technology aligns with and communicates its contribution to organizational success.

This Article at a Glance

Expanding on my earlier insights, this article explores:

  • Bridging the Gap: How feedback led me to revise our division’s mission, vision, and purpose to better align with business objectives.
  • Operational Efficiency vs. Value Realization: Balancing delivery speed with measurable outcomes is essential.
  • Embedding Outcomes Into Workflow: Practical steps for tying engineering work to organizational strategy and customer impact.
  • The Power of Language: Technology leaders must articulate the value of technical investments and technical debt in business-focused terms that align with priorities and resonate with key stakeholders.
  • A Call to Action: How technology teams can move from being seen as cost centers to strategic partners.

Engineering’s Philosophy: Code Is Not the Product

At the heart of our transformation lies a guiding philosophy: “Code is not the product. The value it brings is the product.”

This philosophy reshaped how we approach our work, from mission to execution. Our approach centers on two pillars:

  1. Flow: Improving the efficiency and quality of how work moves through teams and systems.
  2. Value Realization: Identifying and measuring the actual business and customer results of completed work.

Balancing these two pillars ensures that we deliver efficiently and create meaningful results.

Speaking the Language of Business

One of the greatest challenges for technology leaders is translating technical initiatives into terms the business understands. This communication requires reframing technical concepts—like reducing technical debt or implementing refactoring—regarding their impact on business outcomes. For example:

  • Instead of, “We need to address technical debt,” explain, “This initiative will reduce downtime risk and enable us to deliver features 30% faster.”
  • Rather than saying, “We’re optimizing the architecture,” highlight, “This change will scale our platform to support twice as many customers next year.”

Engineering becomes part of the strategic conversation by framing technical work regarding customer retention, revenue growth, or operational efficiency. By quantifying the return on investment (ROI) of addressing technical debt—such as projecting a 30% increase in delivery speed—we can demonstrate how these investments contribute to revenue growth and operational efficiency. This approach bridges the gap between technical efforts and business priorities, ensuring that engineering is seen as a strategic partner, not just a cost center.

Embedding Outcomes Into Engineering Work

Integrating expected outcomes into the team’s work and requiring every Epic to define a specific anticipated outcome helps bridge the divide between effort and impact. This approach ensures teams fully grasp the “why” behind their work and understand its alignment with organizational objectives. For each Epic, teams are encouraged to define the anticipated outcome and to consider key questions such as:

  • What problem are we solving?
  • What results do we expect, and how will we measure them?
  • What metrics define success?
  • How will we learn from the outcomes?

This clarity fosters accountability, focus, and a shift from delivering tasks to achieving meaningful results. By integrating Value Stream Management principles and the product operating model, we create a clear connection between technical initiatives and their business impact, aligning teams at every level.

OKRs further strengthen this alignment by linking engineering work to measurable outcomes. Team-level OKRs focus on delivering customer value while connecting day-to-day tasks to broader organizational goals. Embedding Outcomes in Epics and OKRs transforms engineering from a cost center to a strategic partner, demonstrating how every contribution drives customer impact and business success.

Every outcome or team-level OKR must have a clear owner—someone accountable for bringing the objective to the team, ensuring alignment, and seeing it through to completion. This owner, whether a Product Manager, technical lead, or another designated team member, is the point person for driving the initiative forward. They are responsible for defining the outcome and collaborating with the team to ensure it is achievable, measurable, and tied to organizational goals.

An accountable owner ensures that outcomes are not vague concepts but actionable goals with clear responsibility. This ownership fosters clarity, prevents ambiguity, and strengthens accountability within the team. For example, a Product Manager might own a customer-facing feature’s outcome, ensuring it improves user engagement by 15%, while a technical lead might own the outcome of reducing system downtime by 20%.

By assigning ownership, teams can better prioritize their efforts, align around shared goals, and deliver outcomes that matter. Ownership also reinforces the importance of closing the loop—documenting actual outcomes and reflecting on whether the objectives were achieved—ensuring a culture of accountability and continuous improvement.

Minimizing Layoffs and Rethinking Team Design

One of my long-term goals is to minimize layoffs as a cost-cutting measure by demonstrating the business value of engineering teams. Too often, layoffs are driven by salary costs, ignoring these teams’ contributions to revenue growth, customer retention, and operational efficiency.

Preventing layoffs begins with how we build and structure teams. Instead of defaulting to large, reactive hiring sprees, we can:

  1. Prioritize Outcomes Over Outputs: Build teams around clearly defined goals, ensuring their work aligns with business priorities.
  2. Right-Size Teams: Hire based on strategic needs, avoiding unnecessary headcount that creates inefficiencies.
  3. Focus on Sustainability: Scale deliberately, ensuring that teams are resilient, efficient, and aligned with organizational goals.

By calculating the cost of cross-functional teams and tying their contributions to measurable results, leaders can demonstrate the return on investment (ROI) of engineering investments. For instance, hiring two additional backend engineers and one data analyst might cost $X but could reduce customer onboarding time by 25%, leading to a 15% increase in customer retention—an outcome directly tied to the organization’s revenue growth.

A Commitment to Innovation

While this article focuses on aligning engineering with business outcomes, innovation remains a critical priority. Initiatives like “20% time” provide space for exploration and creativity, fostering long-term resilience and growth. Balancing immediate business needs with future-focused innovation is essential for staying competitive in a rapidly changing market.

A Call to Action

The feedback I received this year reminded me that technology leadership isn’t just about technical and operational excellence—it’s about driving measurable business results. Moving forward, I’m committed to linking technology investments to business results through:

  1. Embedding outcomes into every level of work, from Epics to team-level OKRs.
  2. Communicating engineering efforts regarding anticipated business outcomes and business impact using clear, relatable language.
  3. Balancing operational efficiency with value realization, ensuring every initiative contributes to organizational goals.

This journey is about more than improving delivery; it’s about ensuring that every line of Code, every feature, and every initiative creates value for customers and drives business success. By embracing this mindset, we can transform engineering from a cost center into a strategic partner, proving that our work is essential to organizational growth and resilience.

Next in the Series

In the final article of this series, we’ll move from leadership insights to practical guidance on escaping the ‘build trap’ and creating meaningful outcomes for your team. Read Now →

Poking Holes

I invite your perspective on my posts. What are your thoughts?.

Let’s talk: [email protected]

Engineering’s Business Value: From Black Box to Clarity

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6 min read

This post is the first installment of my three-part series on connecting technology to business outcomes. In this foundational article, I delve into how organizations can redefine the value of software engineering by aligning technical efforts with measurable business results and customer impact.

Introduction

As a software engineer and technology leader with 25 years of experience spanning both waterfall and agile eras, I’ve heard the same refrain: “Technology is a cost center.” I’ve participated in reduction-in-force initiatives, stacked ranking exercises, and engineering team cuts—all driven by this persistent mindset. This experience has shaped my mission today: fundamentally changing how organizations view technology investments by directly linking our work to business and customer outcomes.

The Problem to Solve

The fundamental challenge in technology leadership has remained constant through every era: how do we effectively link and communicate the ROI of our engineering investments? This challenge can be addressed as organizations shift to a product operating model and embrace Value Stream Management (VSM). These frameworks focus on aligning work with value streams that deliver measurable business and customer outcomes, ensuring that engineering efforts are tied directly to strategic priorities.

Technology roles, commanding some of the highest salaries in modern organizations, often become prime targets for cost reduction initiatives. The math seems simple on paper—reducing engineering headcount produces an immediate, significant impact on the bottom line. Yet calculating true costs and ROI becomes complex when team members are shared across multiple initiatives. Modern organizations are solving this through intentional team design: implementing stable, cross-functional teams with dedicated software engineers and selective sharing of specialized roles like Product Managers and Agile Leaders across a limited number of teams. By moving work to teams rather than moving people between teams, organizations can more accurately track costs, measure value delivery, and demonstrate ROI at the team and value stream or product level.

For many senior leaders, the world of digital products, systems, and software engineering can feel like an entirely foreign language—and for good reason. Despite its critical role, technology efficiency and performance are often treated as a “black box” within organizations. Meanwhile, departments like Marketing, Sales, and Product consistently align their efforts with measurable business outcomes.

This disconnect creates a significant gap in organizational insight and decision-making. Are we employing the right number of engineers within our budget? Are we simply hiring engineers without a clear plan for assigning work? By adopting smarter hiring and capacity management practices, we can minimize unnecessary overhead and avoid layoffs caused by poor resource planning. The key to closing this gap lies in establishing frameworks and improving visibility to clearly articulate the tangible value technology brings to the business. It all starts with defining clear, measurable outcomes.

Operational Efficiency, Realization, and Alignment

Until new solutions emerge, technology success stems from excelling in two core areas, seamlessly linked through strategic alignment.

  1. Flow: Operational efficiency in delivering value, from ideation to implementation
  2. Realization: Measurable business impact of technology initiatives

Well-structured OKRs bridge these areas by translating organizational strategy into team-level objectives, ensuring every technical effort connects directly to business outcomes.

Flow: Modern tools and practices have revolutionized measuring and improving performance. Agile methodologies, Team Topologies, DevOps strategies, value stream management, and advanced analytics now offer insights into operational workflows and delivery efficiency.  

Realization: Modern tracking and measurement tools empower teams to gather, organize, and analyze meaningful data, even when results take months or longer. The insights provided by these technologies “close the loop” by clearly connecting technical efforts to tangible business outcomes. Even when the results fall short of expectations, these insights empower teams to reflect, refine, or pivot their approach entirely.

Team alignment: Product Operating Model and OKRs

The shift to a product operating model is fundamental to linking engineering efforts to business outcomes. Organizations enable teams to own changes throughout the product lifecycle by aligning teams around products instead of projects. This ownership fosters expertise, accountability, and a long-term focus on delivering customer value. Unlike the traditional project-based approach, which often prioritizes short-term deliverables, the product model supports continuous improvement and meaningful outcomes over time.

OKRs are a powerful tool for bridging the gap between technology investments and business outcomes. When crafted effectively, OKRs should reflect your team’s primary responsibilities and stay within their span of control, ensuring alignment with the organization’s broader goals. This approach keeps everyone focused on the same mission while linking team efforts to delivering real customer value.

By creating a clear line of sight between your team’s work, customer value, and measurable business outcomes, OKRs provide a roadmap for demonstrating the tangible impact of technology investments. They turn abstract efforts into visible results, demystifying the role of engineering in driving success.

Start with Outcomes

Success in technology is often misunderstood. While delivering stories, releasing epics, or launching products signify progress, they fail to guarantee success. True success lies in whether the work delivered creates valuable outcomes. Even when outcomes fall short of expectations, success can be found in the insights gained—insights that help teams refine their approach and uncover overlooked factors. This shift in defining success is crucial for demonstrating technology’s business value.

Product managers are responsible for defining and measuring feature outcomes, while technical team members are accountable for articulating the anticipated results of addressing technical debt. This dual ownership ensures that both business features and technical investments are tied to measurable outcomes. When technical teams can link technical debt to specific business impacts, these investments transform from mysterious “maintenance work” into strategic initiatives with clear business value.

Alignment and Purpose

Starting with anticipated outcomes enables teams to develop meaningful OKRs that cascade from organizational strategy. By first defining the expected impact of their work, teams can craft team-level OKRs that naturally align with broader strategic objectives. This outcome-first approach ensures that every epic and initiative has a clearly defined, customer-centric goal and connects directly to the organization’s strategic direction. This approach prevents the common anti-pattern from creating OKRs, focusing solely on output rather than meaningful results.

By documenting both anticipated and actual outcomes at the epic level, teams can:

  • Track how their work contributes to business results over time
  • Make data-driven decisions about resource allocation
  • Better prioritize work based on expected impact
  • Build a straightforward narrative around technology investments
  • Bridge the communication gap between technical and business stakeholders
  • Leverage modern tools to provide visibility into both efficiency and impact

ROI for Engineering Teams

By evaluating the return on investment (ROI) of our cross-functional teams—comparing development costs with the financial benefits of improved features or business outcomes—we can make smarter decisions about resource allocation while showcasing the measurable impact of our engineering efforts.

Summary

It’s time to demystify technology’s role in business success. By adopting an outcome-based approach, defining actionable OKRs, and framing decisions regarding business value, we enable technology to drive growth. These practices don’t just justify investments—they link technology investments to business results and create a roadmap for long-term success.

This mission is personal to me: to reshape how organizations perceive technology—from a cost center to a catalyst for innovation, growth, and customer satisfaction. This transformation demands connecting technical decisions, code, and architectural choices to measurable outcomes. When we align technology with clear business and customer value, we not only bridge the gap between investment and impact—we close it entirely.

Next in the series

In the next article, I’ll share how a personal leadership epiphany can transform our engineering organization from a cost center into a strategic partner, with practical insights for driving business results. Read Now →

Poking Holes

I invite your perspective on my posts. What are your thoughts?.

Let’s talk: [email protected]

Profitable Engineering: Linking Software Engineering to Business Results

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3 min read

From Code to Impact: A Leadership Series on Linking Software to Business Success

In late 2024, a 360-degree leadership assessment brought candid feedback from an executive peer outside the tech sphere that hit hard: “Focus more on driving business results.” After years of leading digital transformation—scaling our organization from $10 million to $110 million in revenue through changes in culture, team design, architecture, and modern practices like Agile, DevOps, and VSM—it became clear that we hadn’t effectively articulated how our technology initiatives contributed to the company’s bottom line. This series is my response—a thoughtful exploration of aligning engineering efforts with measurable outcomes and turning technology into a powerful engine for business success.

My goal is to change how organizations view technology investments by showing a clear connection between our work and business or customer outcomes. In this three-part series, I draw from 25 years of experience in software engineering and technology leadership, where I’ve often seen technology labeled as just a cost center. These articles aim to provide practical insights and strategies to shift this perspective, highlighting how technology can drive innovation, growth, and customer satisfaction. By adopting modern practices, a product-driven operating model, and data-driven insights, we can create engaged teams that act as business partners rather than cost centers, delivering value more effectively.

This series is for technology leaders, Product Managers, and anyone looking to align engineering with organizational goals. We’ll cover how to clearly show the value of technology, integrate outcomes into workflows, and connect technical work to business success.

This series offers a comprehensive guide to aligning software engineering with business success, balancing foundational concepts with leadership insights and practical steps for transformation. Each article can stand alone but builds on the others—starting with the basics of technology’s role in business, advancing to leadership strategies for driving outcomes and concluding with actionable steps to empower teams. The intentional overlap reinforces key ideas, while the progression delivers a cohesive, engaging narrative that equips readers to drive meaningful change.

Series Summaries

1. Engineering’s Business Value: From Black Box to Clarity

This foundational article addresses the challenge of linking engineering efforts to business outcomes. It introduces shifting to a product operating model and Value Stream Management (VSM) as frameworks to align technical work with strategic priorities. The emphasis is on defining clear, measurable outcomes to articulate the tangible value technology brings to the business.
Read More →

2. Transforming Engineering: From Cost Center to Strategic Partner

This article builds on the first article and delves into the evolution of engineering roles within organizations. It reflects on leadership experiences and the importance of balancing operational efficiency with value realization. The article discusses embedding outcomes into workflows and the necessity for technology leaders to communicate the value of technical investments in business terms.
Read More →

3. Breaking Free from the Build Trap: Delivering Meaningful Outcomes

The final article focuses on moving beyond a feature factory mindset by concentrating on outcomes rather than outputs. It highlights the pitfalls of the build trap and underscores the value of starting with outcomes, fostering accountability, and ensuring successful delivery. The piece challenges technology leaders and teams to adopt a mindset centered on meaningful outcomes that drive engagement and impactful business results.
Read More →

This series encourages you to rethink your approach and join me in this transformation journey. Feel free to share your thoughts, experiences, or perspectives. I’m always up for a great conversation!

Crossroads 2024: Reflections on Leadership, Legacy, and Modern Practices

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5 min read

Preface: Defining the Last Chapter

As a software engineer and leader who has experienced two distinct eras of software delivery, I’ve witnessed the transformative power of today’s practices. Modern approaches to team design, architecture, and processes drive fast flow, delivering value faster and out-innovating the competition.

Now, I find myself where my leaders once stood—in the latter part of my career. My mentors have challenged me to reflect on how I want to spend these remaining years, placing me at a pivotal crossroads. Recently, my organization was acquired by a larger global enterprise—a familiar environment from my past experiences, with its inherent expectations and complexities.

During an interview for a national publication, I was asked a question that resonated deeply: “What is your role now?” The interviewer noted that my website suggested I might be a consultant. I thrive as a VP of Technology or Head of Software Engineering, where I influence transformation, inspire teams, and design systems that deliver exceptional results. The role allows me to lead with impact, foster innovation, and continuously learn and experiment.

As I approach the final chapter of my career, I ask myself: How do I want to spend these years? Where can I make the most significant impact? This reflection is not about uncertainty—it’s about clarity of purpose. My mission remains steadfast: to inspire leaders, empower teams, and leave a legacy that champions modern practices, continuous learning, and the art of the possible.

The Journey: Transforming Leadership and Leaving a Legacy in Modern Practices

I began my career as a software engineer, driven by a love for problem-solving and building creative solutions through software code. While I still value those things, my focus has evolved toward technical leadership—specifically, helping senior leaders create environments where technologists can thrive and deliver exceptional results.

This journey has been shaped by personal experiences and remarkable technological advancements that have redefined how we work. Cloud computing has dramatically lowered barriers to experimentation and innovation, enabling teams to deliver solutions at unprecedented speeds. Methodologies such as Agile, Lean, DevOps, and Value Stream Management have unlocked new possibilities for collaboration and delivery. Advancements in architecture and cloud technology, along with modern team design, have made these changes both practical and impactful. These innovations have inspired me and driven this mission forward.

My journey has sometimes been challenging. In 2018, I realized that my mindset, rooted in past ways and successes, clashed with the future we were trying to build. A manager on my team encouraged me to read books and articles, while a peer suggested foundational works like The Phoenix Project. Meanwhile, an Agile leader pointed out that some of my outdated habits—like calling team members “resources” or moving individuals between teams—were disrupting the stability and collaboration essential for cross-functional success.

Their feedback and reflections brought me to an important realization: to thrive in current practices, I needed to unlearn outdated methodologies, adopt a growth mindset, and incorporate experimentation as a fundamental aspect of leadership. Recognizing the need to move beyond past expertise, I committed to continuous learning and re-evaluating my approach to leadership and competitiveness in today’s software delivery landscape.

At the core of this transformation is culture. A strong culture precedes processes, tools, and methodologies. It places people at the center of an organization’s purpose. Teams can achieve extraordinary outcomes by fostering trust, ensuring psychological safety and a sense of purpose, and encouraging diverse perspectives.

As seasoned leaders, we must temper our egos, challenge our viewpoints, and remain open to new opportunities. Leadership isn’t about perfection; it’s about progress, building trust, and empowering teams to thrive.

Exploring the Potential of AI

Like many others, I am invested in understanding how AI transforms our world. Generative AI tools empower developers to work more efficiently, solve problems faster, and explore creative solutions. At the same time, these advancements present challenges as we adapt our governance, understanding, processes, and cultures to leverage AI’s potential.

AI is still in its early stages, but it is important to adopt it thoughtfully and be “the human in the loop” in the process. I see AI as a tool that complements modern leadership, opening up new opportunities for innovation and engagement. It has the potential to boost productivity, empower teams, and reshape how we deliver value, which motivates me to continue exploring its possibilities.

Today’s Goal: Value and Fast Flow

Pushing boundaries is essential to achieving fast flow and delivering value. However, managing “knowledge work” presents unique challenges. In most cases, we rely on predictions—our best guesses—about outcomes and timelines, often navigating unknowns in new requests. Leaders expect accuracy, yet the reality of uncertainty demands adaptability.

Over my career, I’ve witnessed how great teams operate and how leadership can either drive or derail success. I bring this experience to organizations, helping them deliver value faster, safer, and more effectively by aligning modern practices and tools with their specific contexts.

  • What: Deliver value through fast flow by integrating processes, frameworks, and technology tailored to the organization’s needs.
  • How: Leverage practices and frameworks that enable faster feedback, reduce risks, and minimize wasted efforts. By implementing a mix of culture, team design, architecture, Agile, Lean, DevOps, Value Stream Management, and modern infrastructure, organizations can pivot quickly and respond to real-time feedback—staying on course, adjusting direction, or halting when necessary.
  • Measure Success: Use outcome and flow metrics to drive continuous feedback and improvement, ensuring every step adds value and minimizes uncertainty.

Mission: Building Teams, Empowering Leaders, and Delivering Impact

Having led teams through two distinct software delivery eras, I’ve never been more passionate about my role than I am now. Our industry’s changing tools and practices have expanded what’s possible, inspiring me to build teams and organizations that set new standards.

My mission is simple: to deliver the right digital products quickly, securely, and efficiently while fostering a culture of innovation and engagement. I aim to meaningfully impact teams, organizations, and customers, helping them achieve exceptional outcomes through modern practices, a product operating model, and data-driven insights.

High-performing teams prioritize based on expected outcomes, driving efficiency while maintaining a strong sense of purpose. This alignment enhances engagement, ensuring a greater impact for every dollar invested.

Conclusion

I will honor those who influenced and inspired me if I can continue to help even one senior leader, organization, team, or individual create thriving environments, rethink leadership, or achieve better outcomes.

Navigating the Digital Product Workflow Metrics Landscape: From DORA to Comprehensive Value Stream Management Platform Solutions

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19 min read

Using engineering metrics can greatly improve your work. Which metrics can help you and your teams improve practices and increase your ability to deliver value to customers more quickly, efficiently, and accurately?

This article is designed to empower senior leaders like you to navigate the landscape of digital product delivery metrics platforms and tools. It offers insights into the various options available and the rationale for selecting one solution over another when determining the most suitable metrics platform.

In the rapidly evolving landscape of software engineering and digital product delivery, leaders are increasingly reevaluating their approaches to team performance, productivity, and metrics. These leaders are turning to quantitative and qualitative data to make delivery teams’ performance and efficiency improvement efforts more transparent. Teams seek data-driven insights to identify bottlenecks, uncover root causes, and evaluate potential enhancements. They aim to eliminate or refine these obstacles by experimenting with various changes to achieve greater efficiency.

Assessing software engineering performance remains one of the most significant challenges for organizations and corporate enterprises alike.

“Any observed statistical regularity will tend to collapse once pressure is placed upon it for control purposes.” – Charles Goodhart

“Goodhart’s Law tells us that ‘when a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure.” – Marilyn Strathern

Embracing new metrics for today’s work environment is not immune to Goodhart’s law and the potential pitfalls of gamification. Therefore, both leaders and delivery teams must embrace these metrics and distinguish between business discussions and team conversations when analyzing and utilizing them.

However, having data insights and optimizing the performance of your delivery team is not just a necessity but a gateway to capturing performance insights, maintaining competitiveness, and enhancing processes, practices, automation, and team design to deliver value effectively.

As a senior leader with extensive experience guiding technology teams through digital transformation, I have witnessed firsthand the vital role of selecting the right metrics platform. During 2020 and 2021, I faced a similar challenge while assessing and implementing a metrics platform to gain insights into our digital transformation efforts, team structure, and automation investments. Leveraging my background, I quickly gained a deeper understanding of modern metrics.

At that time, a senior leader in our division, much like some of you, struggled to grasp the various metrics options and their relevance to our current delivery capabilities, often fixating on vendor pricing—a legitimate concern given our tight budget. This misunderstanding led to friction as we aimed to identify the best solution. While I acknowledged the advantages of different platforms, the leader’s emphasis on cost over functionality complicated our decision-making process.

After more than eight years of investing in our architecture, team design, automation, and delivery processes, we arrived at a critical decision point: Should we invest in a Software Engineering Intelligence (SEI) platform tailored for delivery, or should we pursue a comprehensive Value Stream Management (VSM) solution that encompasses the entire lifecycle from ideation to production? It’s important to note that the concept of an SEI platform didn’t even exist three years ago when we began our evaluation. At that time, we only had DORA and various vendors offering metrics platforms that needed more coverage across all stages, focused solely on parts of the delivery process, or had notable gaps in delivery insights, even among holistic solutions. I aimed to compare all vendor options, assess their coverage and focus, identify gaps across each workflow phase, and select the best fit.

We initially assessed ten vendors and ultimately narrowed our options to two: our preferred SEI solution and our top choice for the VSM platform. If budget constraints had not been an issue, I would have acquired both solutions to seamlessly bridge the gaps between them. I even lightheartedly suggested a potential merger for both vendors! We chose a VSMP solution based on where we assessed our bottlenecks and stage. This experience also inspired one of my early articles on the subject – Finally, Metrics That Help. Contact me if you’d like to explore my experiences, methodologies, discussions, and presentations related to this evolution in metrics.

Fast forward to 2024, and we discover the inspiration behind this article. I learned about a senior technology leader tasked with transforming and enhancing the large technology team he inherited upon joining an enterprise company. His primary objective is to turn the department around and to improve digital product delivery. He aims to reintegrate QA and product delivery responsibilities into teams—responsibilities removed during previous cost-cutting measures implemented by earlier stakeholders before he arrived in the organization. Based on my understanding, part of his strategy includes adopting delivery performance metrics to establish team metrics that will create a baseline for current performance, offer valuable insights, and initiate a pathway to enhancing overall performance and efficiency. He has focused explicitly on or selected DORA metrics to better understand product delivery roles and processes. Although I didn’t have the opportunity to discuss this with the leader before his decision, I am intrigued by how he arrived at the choice of DORA metrics. This presents a unique opportunity for us to learn and grow in our understanding of metrics. Given that this enterprise technology team has been delivering work effectively in an agile environment for years, I wonder if his decision truly addresses the more significant challenges faced by his division in improving the delivery process. Are these the appropriate metrics and feedback mechanisms to resolve workflow bottlenecks?

Stages of the Product Delivery Workflow

Once you understand the workflow, you can analyze and pinpoint its bottlenecks. This understanding allows you to implement metrics that offer valuable feedback and insights on these bottlenecks. This feedback is crucial as it helps you identify areas for improvement in an iterative manner.

The stages of the digital product workflow, often discussed in frameworks such as Value Stream Management (VSM) and Flow Engineering, typically follow the journey from an initial idea to the moment the product delivers value to the customer. Understanding these phases is essential for grasping how work flows within an organization and identifying where value is created.

The key stages or phases of the digital product workflow are:

  • Ideation (or Discovery)
  • Delivery
  • Operations
  • Support

Ideation (or Discovery): This phase focuses on generating, prioritizing, and refining ideas. It involves understanding what should be developed based on customer needs, market demands, and strategic objectives. This stage lays the groundwork for all future efforts and encompasses market research, gathering user feedback, and creating early design prototypes.

Delivery: Once an idea is validated, it transitions into the delivery phase, where actual development occurs. Delivery includes coding, testing, and deploying the product. This phase emphasizes transforming ideas into tangible products ready for customer delivery. It also encompasses the CI/CD pipeline, where DORA metrics are often utilized.

Operations: Once the product is delivered, it transitions into the operations phase. This stage is crucial in maintaining and managing the product within a live environment. Your work in performance monitoring, infrastructure management, and ensuring the product operates smoothly and efficiently is key to the product’s quality.

Support: The final stage is support, encompassing customer service, incident management, and ongoing enhancements based on user feedback. Your continuous efforts in this phase ensure that customers derive continued value from the product while effectively addressing any issues arising after deployment.

Value Stream Management resources, Product Flow, and Flow Engineering often highlight these stages. They offer a structured framework for understanding the workflow, guiding it from the initial idea to continuously delivering value to customers. These stages enable organizations to grasp how value is generated and delivered, facilitating more effective management of the entire product lifecycle.

Understanding the Types of Metrics Platforms

Before exploring specific tools, it’s essential to grasp the three main categories of qualitative metrics platforms focused on delivery performance insights as I understand them: DORA metrics, DX Core 4, Software Engineering Intelligence (SEI) platforms, and Value Stream Management (VSM), along with flow metrics.

DORA Metrics

“The bottleneck is Deployment.” Focus is on a very narrow slice of the overall work flow.

DORA (DevOps Research and Assessment) metrics are designed to measure the effectiveness and efficiency of your software delivery process from code commit to deployment. These metrics include:

  • Change lead time
  • Deployment frequency
  • Change fail percentage (previously change failure rate)
  • Failed deployment recovery time (previously mean time to recovery or MTTR)

The information regarding throughput, stability, and metric definitions is sourced from the dora.dev website.1

Throughput

Throughput measures the velocity of changes that are being made. DORA assesses throughput using the following metrics:

  • Change lead time – This metric measures the time it takes for a code commit or change to be successfully deployed to production. It reflects the efficiency of your delivery pipeline.
  • Deployment frequency – This metric measures how often application changes are deployed to production. Higher deployment frequency indicates a more agile and responsive delivery process.

Stability

Stability measures the quality of the changes delivered and the team’s ability to repair failures. DORA assesses throughput using the following metrics:

  • Change fail percentage – This metric measures the percentage of deployments that cause failures in production, requiring hotfixes or rollbacks. A lower change failure rate indicates a more reliable delivery process.
  • Failed deployment recovery time – This metric measures the time it takes to recover from a failed deployment. A lower recovery time indicates a more resilient and responsive system.

Why Choose DORA?

Budget concerns. The bottleneck is deployment (release) and stability.

  • Focused on Deployment Efficiency: DORA metrics are ideal for organizations that need to optimize their CI/CD pipeline and improve deployment frequency and stability.
  • Narrow Scope, High Impact: DORA metrics can provide precise insights to drive improvements if your primary bottlenecks relate to deployment.

DX Core 4 Metrics

“The bottleneck is primarily deployment” and insights into team engagement.

The DX Core 4 is a new entrant in the metrics landscape for 2023 and 2024. This comprehensive framework aims to measure and enhance productivity among developers and delivery teams by focusing on four essential dimensions: speed, effectiveness, quality, and business impact. Designed to integrate insights from established frameworks such as DORA, SPACE, and DevEx, it provides organizations with actionable insights that bridge the gap from frontline teams to executive leadership.2 Similar to DORA, this framework emphasizes the Delivery phase of Flow.

Here are the four dimensions of the DX Core 4 framework:

Speed: Measures how quickly software is developed and delivered, from inception to production.

Key Metrics:

  • Cycle Time: How long a task or feature takes to move through the development pipeline.
  • Lead Time for Changes: Similar to DORA, this measures the time from code commit to production.

Effectiveness: Assess how well development processes achieve their intended outcomes.

Key Metrics:

  • Workflow Efficiency: How efficiently teams move work through different stages.
  • Goal Completion: The ability of the team to meet sprint or project objectives.

Quality: Evaluate the quality of the software being produced.

Key Metrics:

  • Defect Rate: The number of defects or issues found during or after deployment.
  • Code Quality: Measured by the percentage of code needing rework or post-deployment fixes.
  • User Satisfaction: User feedback, often through surveys or Net Promoter Scores (NPS).

Business Impact: Measures how well software development efforts align with and support overall business objectives.

Key Metrics:

  • Feature Adoption: Tracks how customers adopt new features.
  • Revenue Impact: How specific development activities contribute to business revenue or growth.
  • Alignment with Business Goals: Measures the percentage of development work directly contributing to strategic business objectives.

These four dimensions provide a balanced view of development performance, ensuring that teams deliver quickly and produce high-quality work that drives business outcomes. The DX Core 4 framework integrates well with other methodologies like DORA, SPACE, and DevEx, offering a holistic picture (quantitative and qualitative) of productivity.

Why Choose DX Core 4?

The bottleneck or focus is on Delivery performance and Team Sentiment.

Consider DX Core 4 if you aim to accelerate delivery while ensuring that your software meets high-quality standards and aligns with business objectives. This framework enables you to focus on both the technical and business dimensions of software development, providing a balanced approach to enhancing developer productivity in the organization.

Software Engineering Intelligence (SEI) Platforms

“Our bottleneck is Delivery.” Focus is on the Delivery stage.

In recent years, Software Engineering Intelligence (SEI) platforms have emerged as a distinct category, extending beyond traditional DORA metrics primarily focusing on the CI/CD pipeline. Additionally, some analysts, such as McKinsey and solution providers, refer to these as Engineering Management Platforms (EMPs). For the purpose of this post, I will refer to them as SEI platforms.

SEI platforms cover the entire delivery process, from when a work item enters the backlog to its deployment, incorporating metrics like cycle time, throughput, work-in-progress (WIP), and quality indicators such as pull request size and rework rates. These platforms excel by integrating various tools (e.g., Git, CI/CD, project management) to offer a unified view of the entire delivery pipeline.

Some SEI platforms focus on actionable insights and benchmarking, often utilizing data to compare team performance against industry standards. More importantly, these SEI solutions align engineering efforts with broader business objectives, a crucial aspect that traditional DORA metrics often overlook but is of strategic value to any organization.

Some SEI platforms also provide a comprehensive view of the development process, including visibility in developer experience (DX) by tracking productivity and team health, using metrics like WIP and burnout alerts. This holistic view makes them ideal for organizations looking to optimize workflows beyond just CI/CD, instilling confidence in the thoroughness of the approach.

While DORA metrics provide critical insights into deployment efficiency, SEI platforms offer a more comprehensive approach, ideal for organizations seeking to optimize the full delivery pipeline and align with business goals.

Gartner has recently published a market guide on SEI platforms for those interested in exploring this further3.

Here are some key types of metrics commonly found in some of the more known SEI platforms :

  • Cycle Time: Measures the time it takes for a work item to move from the backlog to deployment. This metric helps identify inefficiencies in the development process and highlights areas where delays occur.
  • Throughput: This metric tracks the number of work items completed over a specific period. It provides insight into team productivity and helps assess whether teams meet their delivery goals.
  • Work in Progress (WIP): Monitors the number of items being worked on or in progress. High WIP can indicate bottlenecks or overloading of the team, which can slow overall delivery.
  • Pull Request (PR) Size and Rework Rate: Evaluate the size of pull requests and the frequency of rework required. Smaller PRs with lower rework rates tend to be merged faster and with fewer issues, contributing to smoother deployments.
  • Planning Accuracy: This compares planned versus actual delivery timelines. It helps teams understand how well they estimate their work and whether they consistently meet their commitments.
  • Developer Experience (DX): SEI platforms often include metrics that assess developer satisfaction and efficiency, such as time spent in meetings versus coding and the overall impact of tools and processes on developer productivity.

Why Choose SEI?

Your bottleneck remains in the workflow’s delivery phase, but you have the budget for an SEI solution and need insights beyond code commit to delivery.

  • Optimizing Planning, Development, Deployment, and Stability: SEI platforms are perfect for teams looking to streamline the development and delivery process from backlog to production, balancing speed with quality and introducing team health insights.
  • Broader Than DORA, Narrower Than VSM: SEI platforms offer a middle ground, providing insights into the development process without tracking the entire lifecycle.

Value Stream Management (VSM) Platforms and Flow Metrics

“The bottleneck is upstream.” Insights cover the entire Value Stream (work flow).

Value Stream Management Platforms (VSMP) optimizes the entire digital product lifecycle, from ideation to operation and support. It enables organizations to visualize, measure, and enhance the flow of value across complex systems, identifying inefficiencies and aligning technical and business objectives. Companies ready to adopt VSM typically have mature delivery practices and aim to improve collaboration across teams. VSM platforms provide insights into bottlenecks, work-in-progress limits, and metrics that help organizations assess ROI and align their efforts with business goals, ultimately enhancing predictability and efficiency in software delivery.

Enterprises and companies that have embraced agile and DevOps practices and seek to bridge the divide between business and technology will find these platforms especially beneficial for enhancing predictability, speeding up discovery and delivery, and achieving alignment with business goals across the organization. Like various SEI platform solutions, many top VSM platforms provide valuable insights into team health and metrics associated with developer and team experiences.

Here are some key business metrics commonly found in top VSM platforms today:

  • Flow Velocity: This metric tracks the number of flow items—such as features, defects, risks, and debts—completed within a defined time frame. It provides valuable insight into the amount of value being delivered.
  • Flow Efficiency: The ratio of active time to the total time a flow item spends in the value stream serves as a key metric for assessing the efficiency of work processing.
  • Flow Time: The total duration for a flow item to progress from ideation to completion is a vital metric for assessing time-to-market.
  • Flow Load: Tracks the number of flow items currently in progress. A high volume may signal potential bottlenecks or team overloads.
  • Flow Distribution: Tracks the balance among various types of work—features, defects, risks, and technical debt. This metric ensures that all efforts align with strategic priorities.
  • Cost of Delay: This approach assesses the financial consequences of postponing the delivery of features or projects, enabling organizations to prioritize tasks based on the potential business value lost due to these delays. By quantifying the cost of delay, companies can make informed decisions about which features to prioritize, ultimately maximizing their return on investment (ROI).
  • Value Stream ROI: This metric evaluates the return on investment for various value streams by comparing development costs with the business value generated from delivered features. It enables businesses to assess the financial effectiveness of their development processes, allowing them to adjust resources or priorities to optimize returns.

Why Choose VSM?

  • Holistic View of the Value Stream: VSM tools offer comprehensive visibility, insights, and feedback across the entire digital product workflow. They assist in optimizing each stage, from idea generation to production.
  • Alignment with Strategic Goals: These platforms help ensure that all phases of your software lifecycle are efficient and aligned with your business objectives.

Choosing a Platform

Selecting the appropriate metrics platform requires careful consideration of several factors, such as your budget, the locations of bottlenecks in your product workflow, the specific challenges you seek to resolve, the maturity or efficiencies of your current processes, and the readiness and awareness of your leadership team across the stages.

Identify Your Bottlenecks

  • Deployment Challenges: DORA metrics might be the ideal solution if you are on a tight budget and experience delays mainly after commits, characterized by lengthy lead times or frequent deployment failures. DORA-based tools and surveys can provide the insights necessary to enhance your CI/CD pipeline.
  • Development and Delivery Challenges: If inefficiencies arise during the development phase—such as extended cycle times or excessive work-in-progress—SEI platforms can help you identify and effectively address these challenges. Additionally, if you encounter deployment bottlenecks, including issues from code commit to deployment, while also having a favorable budget, leveraging an SEI platform can offer significant advantages over DORA.
  • Systemic Issues Across the Lifecycle: For organizations facing extensive inefficiencies from ideation to production, VSM platforms offer a comprehensive solution. These platforms adeptly identify and eliminate bottlenecks throughout the value stream, although they may also represent a significant budget investment.

Why Not Start with a Broad Scope VSM Solution?

While starting with a comprehensive Value Stream Mapping (VSM) solution for complete visibility across your value stream may appear logical, strategically targeting specific issues — namely, bottlenecks — can offer significant advantages. The rationale is straightforward: optimizing processes downstream of a bottleneck often leads to underutilization, while enhancing upstream operations without addressing the bottleneck can result in a backlog at that critical choke point. 

You can start by identifying and optimizing the bottleneck in your process. DORA metrics and SEI platforms can be considered for diagnosing CI/CD pipeline issues and delivery phase improvements. After resolving these challenges, you can broaden your focus using SEI or VSM platforms to optimize the broader scope of your value stream or product workflow. This comprehensive approach guarantees that your improvements yield significant and sustainable enhancements in overall efficiency.

Additionally, it is essential to consider various factors, such as the organization’s size, budget constraints associated with different solutions, the readiness of divisional leadership, and the overall comprehension of digital product delivery practices — not just within product and technology teams but across the entire organization.

When to Consider a Broader Scope Platform

Organizations that have invested in and optimized their delivery processes—by establishing highly automated CI/CD pipelines, minimizing waste, and reducing wait times between stages—are ideally positioned to embrace broader-scope platforms, provided they have the budget to support these tools. Here’s why:

  • Emphasize the Early and Late Stages: After optimizing delivery, the subsequent focus should be on refining the ideation, operational, and support phases. Comprehensive platforms ensure that only the most valuable ideas progress, operations run efficiently, and support remains proactive and effective.
  • Comprehensive Optimization: Platforms with a broader scope, such as VSM tools, offer the visibility required to optimize the entire lifecycle. This ensures that every stage—from ideation to support—remains aligned and efficient.
  • Maximizing ROI: These platforms enhance your return on investment by tackling inefficiencies upstream and downstream of delivery, optimizing your existing investments in CI/CD and delivery processes.

Team Sentiment

Team Sentiment: Incorporating team health and sentiment qualitative metrics into your metrics solutions or selections is crucial. Metrics like Developer Experience (DX) and Team Experience (TX) should prioritize team sentiment and well-being, highlighting their importance in fostering a positive work environment. Team health metrics complement the quantitative data from delivery metrics, creating a comprehensive view of software efficiency alongside team health. This combination ensures you optimize processes and nurture a motivated and effective team. While this topic could warrant a follow-up article, or you can read some of my related articles on adopting metrics, it’s essential to integrate qualitative and quantitative feedback into your overall strategy.


Summary

Whether your goal is to refine your CI/CD pipeline using DORA metrics, improve your development process with SEI platforms, or achieve comprehensive visibility with VSM tools, aligning your choice with your strategic objectives is essential. This post highlights the numerous options and solutions available when considering implementing a metrics platform.

By thoughtfully selecting an appropriate platform and pairing it with team health indicators, you can drive continuous improvement, enhance efficiency, and deliver exceptional value to your customers and business. Selecting the appropriate metrics platform for your software delivery process is a vital decision influenced by your organization’s size, specific requirements, and maturity level. Ultimately, it can come down to your organization’s context, budget, and leadership mindset.  

A combination of solutions or tools serves you best, as they can complement one another by filling the gaps left by individual platforms. This holds when finding a solution that offers quantitative performance and qualitative team health and engagement.

From my experience in guiding technology teams through digital transformation and my recent in-depth market evaluation and platform adoption, I’ve learned that readiness is paramount. While the appeal of a more extensive platform can be strong, it’s vital to ensure that your leadership and organizational mindset are prepared for the journey ahead. Without this alignment, even the most advanced metrics platform may fall short of its potential. Therefore, before making the leap, confirm that your team is on board and your organization is ready for the change. Know your constraints, list your anticipated results, and what you want to achieve. Then, pick a solution or combination to help you achieve your expected outcomes.

Options in the Market

I’ve conducted thorough research to choose the best solution for our specific context and have my preferred partners. Additionally, we spent a year exploring the build-versus-buy option, beginning our journey with an in-house solution. If you want to learn more about my experiences, please reach out.

Disclaimer: In this article, I will not endorse any specific vendor. I will provide a foundational understanding based on insights from various vendors and their websites. I do not claim that these mentions represent the only options available in the market or that they accurately capture the purpose of each vendor within their respective categories. Additionally, I need more insight to assess which platform might be superior, as I need to familiarize myself with your organization’s specific context. My aim is simply to give you a head start in your research.

DORA

Several platforms on the market leverage DORA (DevOps Research and Assessment) metrics to evaluate software delivery performance. These platforms emphasize key DORA metrics, including deployment frequency, lead time for changes, mean time to restore (MTTR), and change failure rate. Below are some noteworthy platforms and vendor solutions:

DX Core 4

As the market’s newest framework, few platforms integrate the DX Core 4 metrics into their offerings to help organizations track developer productivity and experience across speed, effectiveness, quality, and business impact. The DX Platform is a primary example, designed by leading researchers behind DORA and SPACE, specifically created to measure developer experience and productivity through qualitative and quantitative insights.

Here are some notable platforms that utilize the DX Core 4 metrics:

  • DX Platform: The DX Platform was specifically designed to measure and improve developer productivity through the DX Core 4 framework.

Alternatives to consider that may not directly incorporate DX Core 4 metrics yet provide comparable insights include:

  • LinearB: Although LinearB does not explicitly use the DX Core 4 framework, it tracks several metrics aligned with speed, effectiveness, and quality, similar to the DX Core 4 dimensions.
  • Pluralsight Flow (formerly GitPrime): aligns with some DX Core 4 dimensions, especially in speed and quality.
  • GitLab: aligns with some of the core tenets of the DX Core 4 framework.

Software Engineering Intelligence (SEI) Platforms

Several platforms explicitly position themselves as Software Engineering Intelligence (SEI) platforms, offering metrics to help organizations optimize software delivery, developer productivity, and business alignment. These platforms go beyond traditional CI/CD metrics and provide deeper insights into development workflows, team efficiency, and alignment with business goals. Here are some leading SEI platforms available today:

Value Stream Management Platforms

Numerous platforms actively position themselves as Value Stream Management (VSM) solutions, offering metrics that track the flow of value throughout an organization’s discovery and development lifecycles. These platforms enable organizations to align software delivery with business objectives, streamline workflows, and reduce inefficiencies within the value stream. VSM platforms are particularly beneficial for enterprises requiring comprehensive governance and oversight in complex release management scenarios. Below, we highlight some of the leading VSM platforms currently available on the market:

Update: September 18, 2024 – Following the publication of this article, Planview has announced its acquisition of Plutora. Press Release.

This article aimed to help senior leaders or other product and technology managers navigate the landscape of performance metrics platforms and tools to measure the performance and engagement of software delivery teams. I hope this post offers valuable insights if you are contemplating the adoption of a metrics platform.

References

  1. DORA, https://dora.dev/guides/dora-metrics-four-keys/
  2. DX Core 4, https://getdx.com/research/measuring-developer-productivity-with-the-dx-core-4/
  3. Software Engineering Intelligence Platforms Reviews and Ratings, https://www.gartner.com/reviews/market/software-engineering-intelligence-platforms, Garnter.com

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