“What are some good KPIs we can use to measure my dev team?” someone recently asked me.

What do you think?

Some metrics are obviously bad. Lines of code produced, for example. Or number of PRs merged. Even number of story points completed.

So some of the bad KPIs are easy to detect.

But how do we choose a good KPI?

I don’t know.

And neither do you.

How can I be so sure?

Because neither you, nor I, nor the question asker, knows what the goals of the team are.

KPIs don’t exist in a vacuum. KPIs are key indicators of progress toward an objective (aka an OKR).

So actually, maybe lines of code is a good KPI. If the OKR is to double the lines of code.