Engineering Productivity, Metrics, and Morale

developer-productivity, engineering-metrics, Leadership, team-morale I gave a talk for Big O(n) Development, a Singapore-based nonprofit that supports career growth and tech leadership in the local developer community. The topic was engineering productivity — specifically, how my team at GitLab measured it, kept morale high, and stayed effective while spread across a dozen time zones. The audience’s questions were outstanding. Genuinely some of the best I’ve gotten at any talk. Here’s what I covered. Metrics On the development side, we tracked a handful of things that actually told us something useful: Merge request rate (what other tools call pull request rate) was the primary productivity signal. We defined it as the number of MRs merged per engineer, per team, per month. The keyword there is team — we never tracked this per person. That creates the wrong incentives and isn’t fair. We used it to spot trends and ask questions, not to rank people. We also tracked open MR age (how long…