All departments from Sales, Marketing to Product reports metrics to the CEO, except for Engineering Department!

I have worked with +1000 engineering teams helping them create a mature software engineering department.

In this blog, I’ll go over the first principle of metrics and which metrics you should be using.

How other departments select their metrics?

The answer is very simple.

What is the purpose of this department existing?

the answer to this question becomes clear by inverting the problem.

What work does a department needs to stop doing for them to get fired?

Let’s answer this for other departments

Sales Department

What work does sales department needs to stop doing for them to get fired?

Answer: If a sales team stops selling, they’ll get fired

There is absolutely no sales team that will not get fired if they stop selling. We got our answer.

Now we need to invert it back to get the metric we should be tracking.

What should I track for a sales team?

Answer: Amount they sold (Revenue)

So far so good. Let’s do another example with Marketing department