We love numbers, don’t we? If we are good managers, it’s natural that we want our people and our teams to get better. Incremental improvement is the mantra of agile philosophy and what better way of doing that than measuring things? Velocity, bug counts, MMTR, cycle time etc. However, there can be a darker side to metrics that we can easily slip into it if we are not careful. What starts off as a way to encourage and motivate a team leads to behaviour that is counter to what we want - stifling innovation and creativity as adherence to the metric becomes the prime driver.

In this talk we look at common metrics we measure as tech leads, what they should and should not be used for and how, by developing a closer relationship with our team, we can dispense with metrics for something less harmful and more effective.