Labs: What Do Elite Dev Teams Look Like? w/ Ori Keren, Co-Founder & CEO of LinearB

**Ori Keren** (0:00)
So we want to say, hey, there's a broader picture, there's all these types of organizations, there's no judgment here, by the way. And let's represent all the engineering organizations that are out there, and give them some sort of framework to improve them, by the way, on the things that they want to improve.

**Conor Bronsdon** (0:17)
This episode is sponsored by LinearB. Accelerate your development pipeline with data-driven engineering metrics, continuous improvement automation, and project visibility, while cutting your software development cycle time in half. Sign up for your free demo at linearb.io and mention the Dev Interrupted Podcast discount for a one-month free when you sign up for an annual Pro membership.
Well, hey folks, welcome to a new type of Dev Interrupted episode. I'm your host for today, Conor Bronsdon. At LinearB, we have spent every day thinking about how to make developers' lives better. And we're gonna start sharing some of that incredible research from our LinearB Labs team with the Dev Interrupted community.
So one of the most important projects we've been doing has been diving into finding a way to understand what it looks like when Dev teams work together at an elite level. When production, speed, and the team's business alignment are firing on all cylinders. By understanding how elite Dev teams work, we can diagnose real, actionable ways to create a culture of continuous improvement within Dev teams and enable your team to go from average to elite. It's why we have these conversations with Dev Interrupted with these elite leaders. And that's exactly what the best minds at LinearB have done with our Engineering Benchmarks Report. So to talk through what we've found is LinearB CEO and co-founder, Ori Keren. Ori, welcome back to the show.

**Ori Keren** (1:36)
Thank you, Conor.

**Conor Bronsdon** (1:37)
Yeah, I really enjoyed kicking off our Season 2 of Dev Interrupted with a conversation about LinearB's founding with you and Dan. It was a wonderful conversation. For anyone who missed it and wants more context in the LinearB, definitely go check that out. That's Episode 1 of Season 2
And I'm really excited to dive more into measuring productivity with you because it's something that we have a clear opinion on at LinearB of how to compare teams and make sure that we are not burdening individual developers. So to see where the report on engineering benchmarks is going to take us, let's start with where we are by talking about the way engineering teams used to think about productivity and how it's measured. Like we've made it to the DORA era now of 2017, 2018 DORA metrics, obviously pulling from the book Accelerate, which I'm sure many folks in the audience are aware of.
What has changed since Accelerate was first published in 2018?

**Ori Keren** (2:30)
Yeah, so first of all, from my perspective or from our perspective, it was really interesting to see companies coming more educated.
It's almost like us at LinearB, we really have the mission to help the engineering organizations measure themselves and to improve.
So every conversation would have started by, hey, this is what you should be measuring. What are you measuring today? And it's almost like total market education. And all of a sudden with this Dora's research and accelerate, it's so fun to see that the engineering leaders are coming much more educated. I think that's the most significant thing, like awareness of what are the important things to measure. I think the group behind Dora did a good job of identifying the key metrics that you should be tracking. We'll talk about the problems that they have there, but they identified and created a very good understanding on focusing on these four key metrics to kind of understand the delivery cadence of an engineering org without damaging culture of engineering orgs and with all the right motivations in place, and that's the key significant thing. Because again, with lines of code and all that, KPIs that you choose will design your culture. And the previous year one design culture were like it's a competition between the developers or gamifying the system. And what Dora did very good, so it kind of like shaped a culture of like, hey, this is team sports, let's work together and improve the key Dora metrics.

**Conor Bronsdon** (4:12)
And just for anyone in the audience who might not know what the Dora metrics are, I suspect everyone knows, but those are deployment frequency, lead time for change, mean time to recovery and change failure rate.
But at LinearB, we've found that going beyond these Dora metrics is important actually. Ori, what made you and the team at LinearB decide that there needed to be more built on top of Dora metrics?