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A useful productivity measure?
5, 2024 In my new role as VP of Engineering, there was one question I was dreading more than any other: “How are you measuring productivity?” I can’t fault the question. I mean, sure, I’d rather it be phrased about how I’m improving productivity, rather than how I’m measuring it, but fair enough.
Like any engineering organization, we spend some percent of our time on fixing bugs, performing maintenance, and other things that are necessary but don’t add value from a customer or user perspective. Then I expanded out the muda into another stacked bar chart, showing how much time was being spent across all of Engineering on deferred maintenance, bugs, on call, incident response, deployments, and so forth. Even if you correctly categorize your muda—it’s very tempting to let edge cases slide—all you have to do is stop fixing bugs, defer some needed upgrades, ignore a security vulnerability... and poof!
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