Why Great Engineering Teams Don't Need Productivity Metrics

Welcome to my newsletter! I'm Dave Anderson, an ex-Amazon Tech Director and GM. I write this newsletter I've called Scarlet Ink, which is a weekly newsletter on tech industry careers and tactical leadership advice.

Free members can read some amount of each article, while paid members can read the full article. For some, part of the article is plenty! But if you'd like to read more, I'd love for you to consider becoming a paid member. 99% of my articles are intended to be evergreen (readable and valid forever). Some weeks I have fresh content; other weeks I'll update/rewrite something from 4+ years ago because I want to keep the quality of all articles high.

Slight digression first. Ok, more than slight.

I had a couple of trips to various places in Europe recently. I spent time biking, hiking, trail running, and, of course, walking around old cities.

At one point I mentioned to my wife that there's a theme of having pride in the United States in part because of how much money we (collectively) make. Because arguably, our wages are pretty high, and that means we can consume many things. Capitalism is practically our country's motto. And our ability to buy iPhones is one of our favorite measurements of wealth. Land of prosperity and all of that.

But then you spend some time in other countries (which I really think everyone should do), and you start to wonder why we can't have nice things. Like the metric system. I was promised we were moving to the metric system in the 80's, and I still don't have it. But anyway.

Slovenia seems to have close to a zero-waste society. I saw a group of teens walking along the street, looking as disreputable as teens always look. They were consuming a post-school snack. I bet they were saying "bro" a lot in Slovenian. As they walked past the common and readily available recycling bins (for various types of materials), they all briefly stopped to separate their recycling respectfully before continuing on their way. How did Slovenia seemingly convince an entire country that garbage cans are basically unnecessary if you recycle aggressively? Including teens, a group well-known to be rebels. It's impressive.

Many of their towns have separate bike and walking paths everywhere. When possible, those paths frequently have curbs and landscaping separating them from the road. You can cross the entire country on bikeable paths and roads without feeling like you're about to be run over. Yes, the USA is big, but I don't see how that's an excuse for our cities to be so dreadfully scary to bike in. There were many locals biking around Ljubljana because it's so convenient and feels safe.

Finally, before I mistakenly turn this into a 3000-word article about Slovenia, I seriously don't understand how or why everyone has such good landscaping. Not just in the cities near tourism areas, but deep in the countryside. Almost every house has a perfect lawn, bushes neatly trimmed, flowers in the windows, and a well-maintained home. I watched a 70+ year old man trimming an acre+ yard with his scythe. Which was fun and impressive. I remember seeing a crumbling, likely 300-year-old farmhouse ruin with the fallen wall stones neatly stacked, and the vines covering the walls were well-trimmed. It gave me the impression that the entire country has a deeply ingrained pride in appearances.

Japan invented bidets (I don't know how we're not collectively embarrassed to use toilet paper), and their public bathrooms are incredibly clean. Floor-to-ceiling stalls with sound generators. It's crazy, considering the disgusting nature of public bathrooms in the USA. Not to mention avoiding eye contact through the seemingly ubiquitous 2" door gaps.

And dare I mention Norway's tunnel system? You drive through a 5 km tunnel and arrive at the dead end in a 35-person seaside village. Yes, oil money, I get it. But still, Seattle's tunnel cost tens of billions and took roughly 50 years to dig. I exaggerate, but Norway wins this one.

Ok, back to measuring technology teams.

Imagine you have achieved the heights of middle management at a large tech company. You have a group of around 500 software engineers working for you. Congratulations!

One of your direct reports, a manager of around one hundred software engineers, says that she needs around fifty more engineers to achieve her goals. You agree that achieving those goals would be a great thing for the company.

However, should you give the approval to hire fifty more engineers?

That's a hard question! One of the fundamentally hardest ones in the industry.

Are the existing engineers doing their jobs well? How would you know? What if they're wasting their time? What if they're not using AI well or are ineffective in another way? Should you just take your manager's word for it that they're making great use of their existing team? Or should you try to verify this in some way?

There are plenty of people, particularly individual contributors, who find it insulting when their leadership team tries to figure out if they're efficient and effective. Yet if you put yourself in the leadership position, I think you'd quickly find yourself asking the same question.

Here's the key question that people want to ask: Compared to how fast a good team would complete this task, how long did my team take?

Since measuring how long a task took is not terribly hard, it means that what we really want is to know how long a task should take. And that's the kicker.

Are we inventing or just doing work?

If you want someone to build you a logo for your company, you can find hundreds of people willing to do it for $5, or you could just ask AI. You'll get a perfectly acceptable logo. It won't be unique, but it will have all the image sizes you need, a social media kit, and so on.

It is cheap because the work product is easy to create. We know how to make them. We understand the process, goal, and general approach to building a logo.

However, any of these cheap logos will be variations of existing logos. Sure, it'll be customized to your company. But it won't be unique or inventive.

If you want a unique logo design (something a legitimate startup might want), the pricing is massively different. The price will increase from $5 a logo to thousands. Why? Because when you apply creativity to a problem, it takes time, brainpower, multiple attempts, discussions, etc.

How long will it take to get the $5 version of a logo? It shouldn't take more than a day.

How long does it take to get the inventive logo made? That's impossible to measure, because you have no idea when you'll reach the desired end. You literally don't know what the good finished product looks like, because you're searching for it. You'll get variations, you'll discuss what you like and don't, and you will iterate. Perhaps for a few days, or perhaps for weeks.

This is a light and simple example of the difference between doing work and inventing.