Don’t Even Try to Measure Individual Productivity

Since I’ve been working in the field, my managers and clients have been trying to measure productivity. What a waste. Individual productivity means nothing.

What does mean something is a team’s throughput. That’s right—a team. A team produces a set of running, tested features—or not. When a team produces a document, that team might be getting ready to be productive, but they haven’t produced anything you can count—unless that document is required as part of the deliverable. Only when a team produces a working demo or prototype—or, even better, a working product—can you see what their productivity is.

If you try to measure individual productivity, you will get some data. And the people you ...

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