Engineering Manager interview question · Most asked
How do you measure your team's performance?
Summary
With team-level delivery metrics — DORA's throughput measures (change lead time, deployment frequency, failed deployment recovery time) and instability measures (change fail rate, deployment rework rate) — combined with developer experience from a regular survey, following SPACE's advice to use several dimensions including perception.
Longer Answer
I compute the metrics from deploy and incident data, review trends with the team and use them to ask where work waits or what fails. I never rank individuals or set metrics as targets — individual activity measures get gamed and discourage reviewing and helping others. To leadership I report trends, context and the improvements underway.
Key Points
- DORA throughput and instability
- SPACE: multiple dimensions incl. perception
- For improvement, never ranking
Deep dive: Measuring Delivery Without Gaming It
Explanation
What interviewers look for
Measurement maturity grounded in research.
Red flags
- Story points or commits per engineer
- No metrics at all
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