What Do We Mean by ‘Developer Productivity’? The term developer productivity comes with some baggage. Some people feel that it’s used as a way to wring every last bit of work out of a team, single out underperformers, or find a way to shoehorn all of the work on which developers spend their time into a single, achiev- able output. Productivity is a complex concept, and it doesn’t easily boil down to a single, concise met - ric. That hasn’t stopped organizations from trying, but those efforts often leave teams with one-dimensional metrics — lines of code written, features shipped, bugs squashed — that don’t adequately reflect the work that development teams are doing. Other metrics like em - ployee Net Promoter Score, product uptime, and customer retention paint a fuller picture of productivity, but can vary wildly from team to team. Because metrics can be so varied, we’ve decided not to focus on specific ones in this guide. Instead, we’ll be looking at the practices and processes that often feed into those num - bers and build the foundation of the real goal behind measuring developer productivity: Keeping your development team engaged, innovative, and building great products that they’re proud of. THE GOAL