Why Can’t We Measure Dev Productivity? - And What to Do Instead
We try to put numbers on our dev team’s output over and over again, and guess what? It doesn’t work.
Why is that?
In traditional businesses, there’s design, engineering, and a production line.
Design and engineering go back and forth until they come up with a satisfactory product and once done the production line takes over.
The production line is straightforward—you can measure output or waste per person or machine if you like.
But in software: product, design and engineering are the production line.
The problem is: Measuring output of this kind of production line with a factory paradigm fails miserably.
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Why Factory-like Metrics Don’t Work for Dev Teams?
You may have tried one of the classics:
1. Count Lines of Code - and ended up with bloated, messy codebase.
2. Count Features Shipped - and get a cluttered product full of useless, untested features.
3. Count Sprint Points - and have your engineers inflate each story and focus on solving small ones to ramp up the numbers.
These and plenty other “logical” solutions are great for gaming the system, not solving real problems.
What we fail to see is that our “production line” is doing creative work.
Beyond a certain point, the quality of creative work isn’t logically quantifiable.
How would you measure the quality of a song, a painting, or a film—especially while it’s still being made?
You can’t. And it’s the same with software.
Developers are creatives, even if they deny, or fail to recognise it.
Developers, scientists, engineers, product managers and even business professionals often go through life convinced they’re not creative, simply because they maybe do not possess an artistic skill or a hobby. The truth is, any profession that involves making choices—like combining concepts or solving problems, or creating new solutions —is inherently creative.
Unfortunately, creativity in these roles is rarely managed or even recognised.
In roles focused on repetitive tasks that prioritise speed and output—like working on a conveyor belt—productivity can be incentivised with straightforward rewards:
work faster - finish earlier
produce more - earn more
However, motivating creative individuals is far more complex and isn’t driven by obvious, direct incentives. In fact, traditional rewards do not correlate with the better output.
When you start seeing your dev and product team as the creatives that they are, you’ll find better ways to measure and optimise the quality of their work—through the quality of their “artistic” motivation.
For a creative person to thrive, the workplace must fulfil three core human needs:
Autonomy, Mastery, and Purpose.
Measuring Productivity with a Happiness Pulse?
One of the teams I got to manage was struggling.
Motivation was low, legacy and tech debt were piling up, and the team was pressured to report on “sprint velocity” while juggling endless feature requests from management.
We already had our bi-weekly retrospectives in place, where we measured all sorts of things.
I suggested to the team lead that we start checking the happiness pulse. But not just “happy/sad/mad.”
I wanted us to reflect on the three big motivators: Autonomy, Mastery, and Purpose.
Every two weeks, we asked the team to rate statements like:
• “I can choose how I solve problems and approach assignments.” - (Autonomy)
• “I get interesting, challenging problems to solve that help me grow my skill.” - (Mastery)
• “What I do matters to me or someone else.” - (Purpose)
The first results? - The depths of despair: Eye-rolls, laugher and sarcastic jokes, and one of the devs even quit that week!
Suffice to say: we got the lowest possible scores. 👎👎👎 -> coincidentally perfectly reflecting the actual productivity levels.
We kept going.
Each new retro, reflecting on these 3 statements opened the door to honest conversations about what wasn’t working—and a path to address it right away.
When work felt boring, we found more challenging problems, or added new stuff that we could learn -> Mastery.
When engineering decisions felt top-down, we assigned ownership so each team member had real authority over a subject they worked on -> Autonomy.
Scores improved — but Purpose still lagged behind.
To tackle Purpose, I connected engineers directly with customer care teams. Instead of vague, secondhand requests, they experienced real problems firsthand, and got instant feedback, and sometimes even a heartfelt, “Omg, I love this!” from users when introducing a change.
I also made a point to share every compliment I heard about their work or our products, giving specific, honest, individual credit openly and publicly every chance I got.
This didn’t just boost happiness scores. —> We became a proactive, productive team that cared deeply about what we were building and we ended up developing some of the most successful products in the company.
At a certain point, we stoped estimating points and stories and no one cared that we didn’t report our velocity anymore. The thing is: when your team is motivated - measuring productivity becomes unnecessary.
Motivated creatives go above and beyond—not because they have to, but because they want to.
Productivity is an emerging property of creative motivation.
Here is an unsolicited advice:
Instead of trying to measure output, try regularly checking the pulse of your team’s motivation with these three questions:
1. “I make my own decisions about how I solve problems.”
2. “I work on things that are challenging and help me grow my skills.”
3. “The stuff I do matters to someone—customers, the company, society, my mom, someone.”
And when they score something low - see what’s the smallest thing you can do right away to solve it.
If you consistently optimise for an upward trend on this metric, I promise - you’ll start seeing results.
It won’t give you a direct correlation with output from day one (and you better not connect a bonus program to these results ;P) but over time, a motivated, creative team doing meaningful work will shine through in your business outcomes.
Hope this helps! Let me know how it goes if you try it!🤘
*The theory on Autonomy, Mastery, and Purpose as key motivators for creatives (and people in general) was popularised by Daniel H. Pink in his book Drive: The Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us (2009). Pink draws on research from psychology and behavioural economics, particularly building on studies by Edward Deci and Richard Ryan, who developed Self-Determination Theory (SDT). SDT identifies autonomy, competence (similar to mastery), and relatedness as the fundamental human needs for intrinsic motivation.
