Practice : Operational KPIs for Dev Teams

Purpose and Strategic Importance

Operational KPIs (Key Performance Indicators) help development teams understand and improve how they deliver, operate, and maintain software. They turn day-to-day engineering work into measurable insights - guiding continuous improvement, strategic alignment, and better outcomes for customers and the business.

By making KPIs visible and actionable, teams gain clarity on performance, own their operational maturity, and foster a culture of accountability, learning, and shared success.

Description of the Practice

  • Operational KPIs are metrics that reflect how well engineering systems and teams are performing in terms of delivery, quality, resilience, and maintainability.
  • Examples include deployment frequency, change failure rate, mean time to recovery (MTTR), availability, lead time for changes, alert volume, and toil levels.
  • KPIs are tracked over time, discussed in rituals (e.g. retros, ops reviews), and used to guide team improvement efforts.
  • They should be selected and shaped by the team - not imposed top-down - and linked to broader business or customer outcomes.

How to Practise It (Playbook)

1. Getting Started

  • Choose a small number of meaningful KPIs that align with your team’s goals (e.g. speed, stability, quality, customer satisfaction).
  • Define how you’ll collect and visualise the metrics - start simple with dashboards or spreadsheet tracking.
  • Set baseline measurements and review them regularly in retros or check-ins.
  • Use the KPIs to ask better questions - not to blame or rank.

2. Scaling and Maturing

  • Align KPIs with frameworks like DORA, SPACE, or your own engineering values.
  • Add context - pair KPIs with qualitative insights from teams and customers.
  • Track trends over time and correlate with incidents, delivery cadence, or tech debt.
  • Automate KPI reporting where possible and make it self-service.
  • Use KPIs to trigger improvement actions (e.g. retros, tech spikes, prioritisation decisions).

3. Team Behaviours to Encourage

  • Own your data - discuss it openly, use it to learn, and challenge what it really tells you.
  • Balance trade-offs - improving one metric shouldn’t degrade another (e.g. speed vs. stability).
  • Focus on trends and actions, not vanity metrics or point-in-time snapshots.
  • Share improvements and lessons learned with other teams.

4. Watch Out For…

  • Metrics without meaning - KPIs that don’t drive behaviour or insight.
  • Gaming the numbers - focus on improvement, not scorekeeping.
  • Lack of context - KPIs need narratives and reflection.
  • Over-measuring - cognitive load increases with too many metrics.

5. Signals of Success

  • Teams use KPIs to guide decisions, identify risks, and prioritise work.
  • Delivery becomes more predictable, stable, and aligned with outcomes.
  • Operational improvements are celebrated and shared.
  • Leaders use KPIs to support teams - not just manage them.
  • Metrics reinforce a culture of ownership, excellence, and learning.