New York

October 15–17, 2025

Berlin

November 3–4, 2025

London

June 2–3, 2026

Measuring productivity without freaking people out

How to keep a healthy culture when you put developers under the microscope

Steve Fenton, Nono Guimbi, Rahul Verma, Nathen Harvey and Lorna Mitchell

Date & time

13:00

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You’ve settled on the key metrics to assess engineering team performance and satisfaction. Now, how do you ensure those metrics don’t become a source of stress or resentment?

Any time you set a target – be it deployment frequency or mean time to recover – the spectre of Goodhart’s Law looms, where metrics can become gameable, toxic, or prioritized beyond the health of the wider team or organization. Engineering leaders need to be vigilant to balance the value of ambitious targets against the risk of damaging team health.

This panel discussion will explore tactics to choose and communicate metrics that balance high performance with a long term culture of continuous improvement.

Key takeaways:

  • Choose metrics your engineers won’t hate
  • Finding a balance between productivity and collaboration
  • How to set goals and use metrics to motivate your team

panelists:

Steve Fenton

Principal DevEx Researcher
Octopus Deploy

Rahul Verma

Engineering Leader
Meta

Moderator: