Startup Growth & Metrics: What to Measure & When | Laura Tacho

**Laura Tacho** (0:00)
You asked me about defending the metrics to the board, but what we haven't touched on is defending the metrics to your team. And I think this is where that developer satisfaction piece comes in. Because the board, they're hungry for metrics. You don't need to convince them that tracking numbers on a piece of paper is a good thing to do. They're like, give me it all.
Your team, though, guaranteed, they're skeptical. They're like, hey, what are you up to? What are you going to do with this? How is this going to impact my job? How is this going to impact the work that I'm doing?
So I very strongly recommend that the team is involved from step zero of implementing metrics if you're doing it for the first time. Developers want to be consulted about the performance and productivity of their teams, not just informed about it.

**Conor Bronsdon** (0:46)
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Hey everyone, welcome back to Dev Interrupted. I am your co-host, Conor Bronsdon. And today we're joined by Laura Tacho, a VP of Engineering and an amazing Engineering Leadership Coach, who also teaches a great course on Engineering Metrics, which we'll get into later. Laura, welcome to the show.

**Laura Tacho** (1:39)
Thanks, Conor. Great to be here.

**Conor Bronsdon** (1:41)
Yeah, Laura, it's wonderful having you on here because you've got a diverse array of experiences. You've led teams at CloudBees, Owlette Education, Nova Credit, and you've coached leaders from over 125 different companies. Is that right?

**Laura Tacho** (1:54)
Yeah, yeah. I have had quite a breadth of experience now, especially since starting coaching full time about a year and a half ago. I've coached leaders through my course, and then I have some leaders that I work with on very extended engagements that last several months or sometimes several years. So it's been quite a different perspective being able to see into dozens of organizations at a time and see all the different things and all the same things that these teams are struggling with.

**Conor Bronsdon** (2:23)
And along the way, you've become a deep expert in developer tools and distributed systems. You've discovered, you mentioned that you enjoy debugging systems of infrastructure as well as systems of people.
And to date, we're gonna dive into both those things. So systems of people and developer tools and how they play together and create magic when it comes to engineering teams.
But first, let's get to know you a little better. So you're a coach today. You've been doing it for a couple of years now. You've had incredible success. But how did you actually get your start in engineering?

**Laura Tacho** (2:56)
I got my start in engineering when I was maybe 11 or 12 years old. And I think like many of you, most of you listening to this, you probably have your nerd origin story.
I have mine, which was when I was, you know, I had an old computer. My uncle was a sysadmin. And then my very first computer was like running Windows 3.1 and DOS.
And my uncle, for whatever reason, thought, like, let's teach this child how to use DOS and like how to use WordPerfect. And I thought that was so cool. Oh, so he was the cool one. And then, I mean, he's still a cool uncle. Let's be honest, still a cool uncle. And that eventually turned into like, hey, let's give this child doom and see what happens. And this is what happens when you give an 11 year old child. I might have even been younger now that I think about it. This is what happened when you give them too. So I was around computers from a very young age, but it wasn't necessarily, aside from my uncle, something that was encouraged at school because I grew up in a small town in Wisconsin of all places. So, I just didn't have a lot of the support system and encouragement that I had, but I kind of stuck with my nerdy streak. I am a kid that went to science camp.
All the good stuff. And then I ended up not going into computer science at university because it just wasn't presented as an option for me, but stayed involved in UX, UI design. And I actually learned programming as something that people would pay me money for via animation. So, all of my nerdy hacking wasn't really giving me the skills to get paid.