Developer Productivity Done for Developers, Not To Them

My days of managing developers are pretty far in my rearview, and my days of being one are so far behind those that they're starting to vanish. But I do remember that one of the things I always found dismaying was how orgs, especially enterprises, tended to think of developer productivity as a thing you do to developers (or at least about them).

In other words, it always seemed to be landing on some metric as a way to judge: JIRA tickets per week or story points per day or whatever. Doing this would have predictably terrible results from the org perspective: inflation of story points and manufacturing of BS tickets in JIRA just to 'close' them at phenomenal rates.

It was all so pointless.

In reality, developer productivity is developer enablement. It's about removing blockers from their path, approving budget for developer productivity tools, and generally making it easier for them to do their jobs (something enterprises notoriously suck at). And perhaps most importantly, it's not valuable at the individual level as much as it is at the team level.

So stop looking for ways to judge your developers and start looking for ways to make them happy and productive.