One Metric to Rule Them All

The first filter to apply to measure, prioritize and act

For the past few years, I have had a question thrown at me every time a contract is signed (such timing!) — what should be measured for an agile team? How do we measure our delivery commitments? How do we measure our productivity? How can we prove we are adding value?

Sure, we end up metrics — story points delivered, velocity (oh so wrong!), features delivered, cycle time, defect density and a whole lot more. But in today’s “digital” world, a world in which feedback and response run in ever tighter circles — and the fastest responder wins — what is a single lens to look at and give direction to the whole messy business of prioritization?

Every layer in the system always seems to have different priorities. Teams care about finishing features, Scrummasters about cycle time and leadership about usage, ROI and quality. The question that vexed me for a long time was this — “how do we get everyone to agree on priorities in less than 5 minutes?”

Eventually, after trying various options — politely pushing, and losing endless hours in discussion on priorities — my conclusion is the the most elegant and transparent method is to focus on a single metric that seems to carry weight across all stakeholders.

User Experience — how many user experiences are diluted, or are sub-optimal ? Alternately, how many user experiences are enhanced due to the change? The only follow-up question is the impact of the change going wrong — can we revert back quickly? Or more appropriate to the times — can we fix forward quickly?

I have found that the single metric focus aligns all stakeholders faster than anything else. Most of the other metrics are useful and important, but give a limited view of the big picture.

What other metrics have you used/seen that have been effective?