How to compare your eng team's velocity to industry benchmarks (and increase your velocity): Step 1: Send your eng team this 4-question survey to get a baseline on key metrics: https://t.co/ppB30rnqx9 You can use any surveying tool to do this—Google Forms, Microsoft Forms, Typeform, etc.—just make sure you can view the responses in a spreadsheet in order to calculate averages. Important: responses must be anonymous to preserve trust, and this survey is designed for people who write code as part of their job. Step 2: Calculate your how you're doing. - For Speed, Quality, and Impact, find the average value for each question’s responses. - For Effectiveness, calculate the percent of favorable responses (also called a Top 2 Box score) across all Effectiveness responses. See the example in the template above. Step 3: Track velocity improvements over time. Once you’ve got a baseline, you can start to regularly re-run this survey to track your progress. Use a quarterly cadence to begin with. Benchmarking data, both internal and external, will help contextualize your results. Remember, speed is only relative to your competition. Here are external benchmarks for the key metrics: You can also download full benchmarking data, including segments on company size, sector, and even benchmarks for mobile engineers here: https://t.co/BN6hjVsBhy Look at 75th percentile values for comparison initially. Being a top-quartile performer is a solid goal for any development team. Step 4: Decide which area to improve first. Look at your data and using benchmarking data as a reference point, pick which metric you believe will make the biggest impact on velocity. To make this decision about what to work on to improve product velocity, drill down to the data on a team level, and also look at qualitative data from the engineers themselves. Step 5: Link efficiency improvements to core business impact metrics Instead of presenting these CI and release improvement projects as “tech debt repayment” or “workflow improvements” without clear goals and outcomes, you can directly link efficiency projects back to core business impact metrics. Ongoing research (https://t.co/acIycjiGeU) continues to show a correlation between developer experience and efficiency, looking at data from 40,000 developers across 800 organizations. Improving the Effectiveness score (DXI) by one point translates to saving 13 minutes per week per developer, equivalent to 10 hours annually. With this org’s 150 engineers, improving the score by one point results in about 33 hours saved per week. For much more, don't miss the full post: https://t.co/OzrcJFTJMO