Value-add capacity (link)
Like any engineering organization, we spend some percent of our time on fixing bugs, performing maintenance, and other things that are necessary but don’t add value from a customer or user perspective. The Japanese term for this is muda.
If we didn’t have any muda, spent all our time on value-add work, and achieved a 10x return on each investment, our productivity would be ten: 1 in salary (or close enough). If we spent 80% of our time on value-add work, our productivity would be eight. Twenty percent, two.
In other words, in the absence of RoI measures, the percent of engineering time spent on value-add activities is a pretty good proxy for productivity.
It completely changed the tenor of the conversation. Suddenly, the conversation shifted from, “how can we get the stuff we want sooner,” to “how can we decrease muda and spend more time on value-add work?” That’s exactly the conversation we need to be having.
When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure.
Goodhart’s Law
Deliver valuable software. Do it often. And write it well.