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Discussion on: Your dev team lead is not controlling enough

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Scott Simontis • Edited

I swear that my control issues are the reason I got into software development, haha! It's definitely caused a lot of issues for me in my career. I feel like good metrics need to directly relate to core business focuses. That varies wildly between companies, but at a basic level it comes down to "how much $ will this add?" Value takes lots of forms though. Maybe this PR fixes some infrastructure scripts which bring monthly server costs down. Maybe we can concurrently serve more users and increase sales and visibility metrics.

I hate to see metrics related to story points, lines of code, etc. If your team isn't capturing requirements well, it punishes developers who choose to work on more difficult issues that probably have a huge effect on the overall bottom line of your company, and can actually discourage people from innovating and taking the risks needed to remain relevant.

I feel like communication is a huge issue. There is an incredible degree of trust between my current development team, and we all feel safe calling each other out if we perceive that something threatens our ability to deliver or our culture. We speak to our sales team very frequently to make sure what we are doing is relevant. If we didn't have a high degree of trust and a safe environment to work out of, none of that would be remotely possible.