Engineering KPIs That Matter

Every engineering leader has likely asked themselves: Are we delivering the right things, at the right pace, in a sustainable way?

It's a complex question that touches on everything from team productivity to business impact.

While measuring engineering work has traditionally been challenging, here at Multitudes, we've learned a lot about which engineering KPIs can help teams thrive.

The key is focusing on meaningful KPIs that tell the full story - not just how fast you're moving, but whether you're creating real value for your users, and supporting your teams along the way.

In this guide, we'll explore which engineering KPIs can help you build more predictable delivery, boost team effectiveness, and demonstrate clear business impact. Whether you're looking to improve sprint planning or make the case for new initiatives, you'll learn practical ways to measure what matters.

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Engineering Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) are carefully selected measurements that tell you how effectively you're achieving business or project objectives.

Engineering KPIs aren't just numbers on a dashboard - they're synthesized stories about how your team creates value. When chosen thoughtfully, these metrics help illuminate what's working well and where teams might need support.

The most impactful KPIs answer questions that resonate across your entire organization:

• Team enablement - Do your developers have what they need to do their best work? This includes everything from tools and processes to psychological safety and sustainable workloads.
• Delivery excellence - Is your team shipping high-quality work at a healthy pace? Great engineering isn't just about speed - it's about finding the sweet spot between velocity and reliability.
• Business impact - Are engineering efforts moving the needle on company goals? The best metrics help demonstrate the concrete value your team brings to users and the business.

By measuring these key areas, you'll get a clearer picture of not just how your engineering team is performing, but how you can help them deliver even more value.

What’s the difference between KPIs and OKRs?

Before jumping into it, it’s also helpful to distinguish KPIs from “Objectives and Key Results” (OKRs).

In contrast to KPIs defined above, OKRs are a goal management strategy focused on action orientated goals and measures, popularized by Google. In the 1970s, Intel CEO Andy Grove evolved Peter Drucker's Management by Objectives (MBO) into OKRs by adding measurable Key Results, which later spread widely across Silicon Valley when John Doerr introduced them to Google in 1999, helping drive the company's remarkable growth and innovation. You can read more about how Google uses OKRs here.

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Every day, engineering teams make countless decisions that shape their products and processes. But without meaningful measurements, it can be challenging to understand if these decisions are leading to better outcomes.

That's where thoughtful KPIs can help guide the way, and ultimately ensure the engineering work aligns with business goals and shows the rest of the business how engineering is contributing towards them.

In our experience, we find there are 3 common reasons why engineering teams need KPIs:

• To improve team performance: To boost team performance: Engineering managers want to build high-performing teams. They aim to celebrate when people are doing great work, and know who might need extra support and coaching.
• To make delivery more predictable: Engineering leaders often get asked how long it's going to take to build something. Estimation is notoriously tricky, but having some data can help leaders and teams sanity-check their estimations, ensure they have enough work to keep the team busy, and figure out what might be blocking or slowing down delivery.
• To make a case for engineering budget: Another big question for engineering leaders is what value they're creating with their resources. They need to show that they've put their teams to good use, so data can be a powerful ally in showing progress and making the business case to expand on successful experiments (e.g., our clients have used Multitudes to show why a four-day workweek won’t impact productivity, or how hiring juniors makes teams better off).

With this context, let’s then dive into what makes a good KPI, which ones to use, and how it can be measured.

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We're often swimming in metrics. Research shows there are now 700-800 different engineering metrics being used across the industry, with teams often creating their own custom measurements.

But not all measurements are equally meaningful.

Let's explore what makes a KPI truly valuable for your team:

• Supports the bigger picture - The best KPIs don't just optimize for one team - they reflect broader strategic priorities (as recommended by Harvard). Before implementing a new metric, consider how it might impact other teams and processes. Will reducing PR review time help your team ship faster, or will it create more burden for your team?

• Easy to track and understand - It's better to choose a good metric that is easier to measure than one that is the perfect metric but which we don't have data for. A KPI is only useful if teams can easily collect and interpret the data. Multitudes for example can automatically gather metrics and present them in clear, actionable dashboards. This helps teams spend less time reporting, more time improving, and should complement your existing workflows, not disrupt them.

• Drives better decisions - The ultimate test of a KPI is whether it helps teams make better decisions. Strong metrics provide insights that guide meaningful improvements, rather than just measuring for measurement's sake.

• SMART goals at the core - The strongest KPIs follow the SMART framework: Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant, and Time-bound. Instead of a vague goal like "ship features faster", you might aim to "increase deployment frequency to once per day within the next quarter." This clarity helps teams understand exactly what they're working toward.

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The key isn't just having metrics — it's understanding exactly what you're trying to measure and why. Teams need to be thoughtful about which metrics they track and ensure they're using the right measurements for their specific goals.

A metric that's perfect for measuring business impact might not be helpful for supporting developer growth, and vice versa. So it’s important to not just implement metrics randomly, but they adhere to a higher level framework that is science-backed and proven to drive software delivery performance.

The 2 leading industry frameworks that contain the KPIs that matter are DORA and SPACE. While there are some overlap, we typically recommend primarily using DORA (for reasons explained below) and weaving in some well-being metrics from SPACE which is missed by DORA.

DORA metrics

DORA metrics are considered an industry gold standard that measures software delivery performance and engineering excellence.

Based on research spanning over 39,000 professionals across organizations of all sizes and industries, the below 4 quantitative DORA metrics have proven to be reliable predictors of organizational performance:

1. Change Lead Time: The time it takes to go from first commit to code successfully running in production.
2. Deployment Frequency: How often an organization deploys code to production or releases it to end users.
3. Failed Deployment Recovery Time (Formerly Mean Time to Recovery): The time it takes to restore service when a deployment causes an outage or service failure in production (whereas previously Mean Time to Recovery also included uncontrollable failure events such as an earthquake disrupting service).
4. Change Failure Rate: The percentage of changes that result in degraded service or require remediation (e.g., that lead to service impairment or outage, and require a hotfix, rollback, fix forward, or patch).

SPACE Framework

The SPACE framework, proposed by Nicole Forsgren, Margaret-Anne Storey, and Chandra Maddila, takes a holistic view of developer productivity by considering 5 key dimensions:

• Satisfaction and Well-being: Measures satisfaction, fulfillment, and well-being, both at work and off work.
• Performance: Outcomes that the organization aims to reach or create value for customers and stakeholders.
• Activity: Combines outputs that are countable, discrete tasks and the time it takes to complete them.
• Communication and Collaboration: Represents the interactions, discussions, and other acts of collaboration that take place within teams.
• Efficiency and Flow: Focuses on the ability of a developer to complete work or make progress.

There are metrics within each of these dimensions which are great measures, while the full paper provides an exhaustive list.

By integrating these dimensions into consideration, the SPACE framework gives managers a holistic view of performance that enables them to make better decisions.

DORA and SPACE aren’t necessarily alternatives. In fact, key author Nicole Forsgren has said it is most helpful to consider DORA an implementation of SPACE framework. While DORA is based on metrics that are good for the psychological safety of the teams, it doesn’t directly measure how people are doing. SPACE fills that gap by bringing in more human-centric metrics, such as the well-being of developers, alongside their efforts.

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To effectively track, analyze and improve Engineering KPIs, teams can use Multitudes.

Multitudes is an engineering insights platform built for sustainable delivery.

Multitudes seamlessly integrates with your existing tools like GitHub, Jira, Google Calendar and PagerDuty to provide actionable insights into your team's delivery performance, operational health, and collaboration patterns.

With Multitudes, you can:

• Automatically track all DORA metrics and other Engineering KPIs highlighted in this article alongside team health and performance indicators
• Gain insight into which types of changes are failing and where improvements are required
• Identify team collaboration patterns that could be affecting your change success rate

Our clients ship 25% faster without sacrificing code quality.

Ready to unlock happier, higher-performing teams?

Try Multitudes today!