Are you missing the most important performance metric?
A surprising metric to consider for identifying the star performers on your tech team
Is it even possible to use key metrics/performance indicators (KPIs) to determine performance?
If you do, in a development team you might have KPIs related to personal velocity, lines of code, bugs, etc. Or you might have decided that all these measures don’t really work, and defaulted to some kind of qualitative approach. Either way…
Who do you think are the star contributors on your team?
If your team was a basketball team, who would be your Kobe Bryant?
Most people can identify the “Kobe” (or the Curry, or the LeBron) on their team. That high scoring player/s is easy to see and easy to credit. They coded the big sexy features. Their code has the fewest bugs. Management appreciates them, and they are rewarded handsomely.
But in the context of a team, what if it was not this simple?
If your team was a basketball team, who would be your Luke Walton?
Luke Walton might not be someone you’ve heard of, and is probably not considered a star in the same way Kobe when they were Lakers. Luke didn’t get high on the scorers lists, but — did you see how much that guy assists?!
Now don’t get me wrong, this is not some “kumbaya” coaches award glory-for-trying-hard! There is statistical basis to the suggestion that “assists” are much more important to your team’s success that you might imagine. (And if you’re thinking this is all very Moneyball , yes (such a great film!!! Watch it asap if you haven’t!). The book was excellent too.)
In basketball, an “assist is attributed to a player who passes the ball to a teammate in a way that leads to a score by field goal, meaning that he or she was “assisting” in the basket” (Wikipedia).
These statisticians crunched a load of NBA data and found that “assists by small forwards contribute the most to a team’s likelihood of winning.”
These statisticians found that “‘assisted team points’ and ‘unassisted team points’ in relationship to win-loss record favored the former and strongly suggested that how a team scores points is more important than the number of points it scores”.
These statisticians found that that “out-assisting the opponent is more important than making more baskets than the opponent. This suggests that having a group of players play as a single unit increases the chances of winning a game.”
What does this mean for tech teams?
Yes, it’s a bit of a logical leap to apply this directly to your tech team, but I hope it’s triggering some things for you to consider. At the end of the day, a bunch of humans in a team trying to deliver a sprint might not be all that different from a team trying to deliver a trophy.
Consider - where are the “assists” happening in your tech team?
Assists can come in many forms. She/he might be…
…sharing some knowledge that improves something someone else is implementing? (remember knowledge “multipliers”?)
…impromptu pair programming to help someone who’s stuck?
…pausing work on something interesting to pick up an ugly production bug that’s blocking someone’s feature deployment?
With these things in mind, does it change your assumptions on who your stars are?
Yes these “assists” are quantitatively difficult to measure in a tech team. But they might just be an important performance metric being missed entirely.
Is there a Luke lurking who’s a star contributor just like your Kobe?
