Using HEAT Metrics to Bring Purpose to Platforms | Simone Casciaroli

**Simone Casciaroli** (0:00)
Imagine again, if you start a company, the first question you want to know is that, is anyone interested in my platform? Do they want to use it? You can't really spend months building something and then start looking for... It used to be like that. I used to work in a company that built a big data platform, and then they were going around and say, are you interested? Are you interested?
It's a big investment, and if it doesn't work, you waste a lot of money. Adoption is probably the sort of thing you want to look at.
And it sounds obvious because it's kind of like, of course, but we don't do it.

**Conor Bronsdon** (0:35)
Are you an engineering leader and tired of constantly being asked, when will it be ready? Stay one step ahead with Linear B's project delivery feature. Our powerful dashboard lets you visualize key milestones, forecast delivery accurately, and align stakeholders effortlessly.
With Linear B's product delivery, you can confidently showcase your planning, prioritize work effectively, and even make data-driven cases for additional headcount. Say goodbye to delays and missed milestones. Sign up for Linear B today and answer, when will it be ready, before anyone even asks.
Hey, everyone, welcome to Dev Interrupted. This is your co-host, Conor Bronsdon. And today I'm delighted to be joined by Simone Casciaroli, Head of Engineering at Onto. Simone, welcome to the show.

**Simone Casciaroli** (1:21)
Thank you, thank you. I'm so excited to be here with you today.

**Conor Bronsdon** (1:24)
Yeah, it's funny. We actually set up a conversation at LeadDev New York earlier this year, but had audio issues. So I'm really excited to have a chance to have you back on the show.
There was an awesome opportunity to kind of see one of your talks there actually. And I was losing my voice because we were talking to so many people. You were like doing these amazing speeches and it was really a great event. And you really caught my attention based on the talk that you gave titled, Are We Building Engineering Platforms Using the Right Metrics?
And obviously as anyone who listens to the show knows, we are very passionate about understanding engineering here at Dev Interrupted. Can you introduce this talk to our audience?

**Simone Casciaroli** (2:10)
Yeah, of course. These still come from a number of passion of mine. So on one end, I truly believe in the power of platforms, in enabling teams and creating an environment where basically like you can do, but your team can do their best. At the same time, I really believe in driving engineering through like a metrics approach. It gives so much more autonomy to teams. Instead of saying something like, you shouldn't implement X and Y to that, you focus on the outcome. You focus on what you want them to achieve. I come from a business product background as well. I run two startups. I work with a number of startups as well.
And for me, it's very clear that a platform team should basically treat the team that are using the platform.
And trying to use the same umbrella of knowledge and tools that I normally use if I had to run a company that had the specific sort of target tokens, I do the same for platform. I literally do the same product tools that we do if I had to run a SaaS and have a certain target audience. It's just that I do it internally for the internal teams. So that was the idea. I think platform as a term has been abused massively.
And as a consequence, I really see some places where the user metrics, I don't think it's right. And if it was just like, you know, syntactically wrong, I would be okay with that. The thing is I see big impact, big negative impact by not using the right metrics. So this is why I felt like this is definitely something I want to get out of my chest.
And so that's the best talk, I guess.

**Conor Bronsdon** (3:51)
What are some of those metrics that you feel are causing problems when they're being used?

**Simone Casciaroli** (3:57)
So this is going to be super controversial. I think so. Let's talk about something that we're all familiar with that are, let's call it infrastructural or, you know, cloud platforms. This is something that every, a lot of companies have. Now, in this space, as you know, this is probably a space that you follow very closely. There has been like a huge amount of progress recently. We used to have ops teams that would be responsible basically for, you know, deploying what the engineering team would be responsible for building. And then at a certain time, we started to talk about DevOps. Obviously, there is still a bit of confusion about what DevOps is, but the truth is that sometime when we build platform teams, I think we treat the platform almost like an ops team. So we target them with metrics that are actually metrics for the whole company. I don't know, like, are we sure that, you know, for example, the normal could be something like, you know, are we sure that Dora is a metrics for the platform?