Economic Downturn is No Excuse to Use Individual Metrics w/ Ori Keren, Co-Founder & CEO of LinearB

**Dan Lines** (0:00)
We're in an interesting point in time in history, where engineering organizations and therefore companies can choose to go on the golden path or revert backwards to this nasty personal metrics kind of thing. Could you give your perspective or say it in your own words on what's happening there?

**SPEAKER_2** (0:20)
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Now, on to today's episode.

**Dan Lines** (0:57)
Hey, everyone. Welcome to Dev Interrupted. I'm your host, Dan Lines, and today I'm joined by my LinearB co-founder, Ori Keren, and you're also LinearB's CEO, Ori. Welcome to the show.

**Ori Keren** (1:14)
Thanks, Dan. Thanks for having me again.

**Dan Lines** (1:17)
Yeah. Awesome every time that we got you on. Love chatting with you, of course. And today we're doing something a little bit different. Things are happening on the planet that we'd like to address.
As probably everybody knows, there's an economic downturn. We're seeing companies that have a bunch of layoffs, not only in the tech sector, but definitely hitting the tech sector.
And first and foremost, if you're in that kind of layoff situation, feel free to hit up the Dev Interrupted community and crew. We know a lot of amazing engineering teams and we can certainly help you out. But secondly, we really want to address the issue, and it's the focus of today's episode. To put it bluntly, we believe there's a right way and a wrong way to think about team productivity or developer productivity.
And this is the thing that companies are currently using to decide who stays, who gets laid off. There's kind of a right way and a wrong way to do it. Obviously, if we haven't said it enough on the show, we believe stack ranking is not the answer, or individual metrics is not the answer. But there's a lot of details that go into that. And that's why we're here today. So we'll open it up with a question to you, Ori. Can you give us kind of an overview of what's happening right now in engineering orgs, in the slowdown, in the economy across the globe?

**Ori Keren** (2:58)
What we're seeing is when we're talking to our customers, we've seen it before in other crises or downturns. But pressure is coming to R&D.
Like, you can see CEOs and boards are saying, hey, go check your efficiency everywhere. And in sales, marketing, success, like they already implemented great technologies that enable them to understand how efficient they are. And since we are at the beginning of moving R&D through digital transformation and having all the data available, some of the learning advances. So now when the pressure is coming, like you said, there are two options that people can take. One is if you are proactive and you have the right data at your fingertips. So for example, you can show, here are the projects that we're working on. You don't have to wait for somebody to come, hey, like show me that you're efficient. You always have it at your fingertips. And you initiate and say, hey, CEO, peers, let's think about what project should we stop, what project should we increase. And if you are able to show how efficient you are, there are standards now in the industry, and you're proactive in that conversation, it's almost like a shield that you can build, like something that helps you protect right now in these terms. And you can give various reasons why you shouldn't cut your headcount or maybe not as much as their organization will ask you. Unfortunately, if you're not equipped with this data, sometimes what happens is people who are not from the industry, again, CEO that came from sales or came from other industries or other regions, they don't know the dynamics and all the details around how you run your organization, how is the team's support and everything.
Let's start creating the developers and take the bottom 5% that are not performing or not performing as good as the other team. And we should talk about what does it mean not performing and cut them.
And yeah, how do you find the 5% and it brings an unnatural pressure on the leaders and they need to take a rough decision. And if it's happening.