If you follow me around the internet (twitter, amongst other things) you will eventually see that I really appreciate the book Team Geek. One of the core themes running through the book focuses on how to keep your team motivated and engaged. They concentrate on the concepts of autonomy, mastery, and purpose. In this post I want to focus on my understanding of purpose.
Autonomy and mastery deserve a fair amount of writing, too - but not right now.
If you have read previous posts you know how important I find goal setting - when done for the right reasons. This kind of goal setting should reflect the deeper purpose for the work you have assigned. As long as this is the case, at least to some degree you have the ability to convert your goals into quantifiable and measurable outcomes. The guys over at Etsy sure do. In fact, the kind of measuring Etsy takes so seriously even brings rise to whole software solutions like New Relic.
I mention all of these things because they all lead up to a concept that I feel CEOs and CFOs really like to focus on: KPI (key performance indicators). If you want to talk to your boss about getting your company to spend more money on your work, one of the key things that you can do is show how the work you do has improved some KPI values. For a practical example, success in my current role depends heavily on the speed at which our application responds to user requests. We will use the New Relic solution to report on response times, and if they are not within the accepted threshold I personally take a decent financial hit. Our customers want fast, most of them said so directly. So it makes sense to closely monitor performance and generate incentives accordingly.
Application performance is most definitely a KPI at my job. So we'll measure its health any way we can. Once you can clearly measure the right things, then you can build strategies for how to impact their value. Once you have evidence that the changes your code make impacts KPI in the right direction, you have another important TLA (three letter acronym) to talk about with your boss: ROI (return on investment). Often we're not in a position that ROI has a tangible and measurable quantity. In another post I'll talk a bit more about ROI that isn't measurable. In this one ROI should show in the trends in KPI, specifically related to the work you have done.
I mention all of these things because they all lead up to a concept that I feel CEOs and CFOs really like to focus on: KPI (key performance indicators). If you want to talk to your boss about getting your company to spend more money on your work, one of the key things that you can do is show how the work you do has improved some KPI values. For a practical example, success in my current role depends heavily on the speed at which our application responds to user requests. We will use the New Relic solution to report on response times, and if they are not within the accepted threshold I personally take a decent financial hit. Our customers want fast, most of them said so directly. So it makes sense to closely monitor performance and generate incentives accordingly.
Application performance is most definitely a KPI at my job. So we'll measure its health any way we can. Once you can clearly measure the right things, then you can build strategies for how to impact their value. Once you have evidence that the changes your code make impacts KPI in the right direction, you have another important TLA (three letter acronym) to talk about with your boss: ROI (return on investment). Often we're not in a position that ROI has a tangible and measurable quantity. In another post I'll talk a bit more about ROI that isn't measurable. In this one ROI should show in the trends in KPI, specifically related to the work you have done.
In a development environment that supports rapid deployments, it should not provide challenging to make a small code change and see how KPI change. So, make sure you check in code that gets tied to KPI positively. Then you know your work has purpose, and you also have a compelling reason to ask for more money.
