What should dev teams measure first? With Luca Rossi of Translated

**Dan Lines** (0:03)
Hey, everyone, welcome to Dev Interrupted, I'm Dan Lines. And today's topic is wine measure. It's one of the hottest trends in engineering organizations around the globe. So we've brought in Luca Rossi, Head of Engineering at Translated, to tell us how measuring developers isn't complete tyranny.
Luca, thanks for joining me today on Dev Interrupted.

**Luca Rossi** (0:28)
Thank you. Thank you for having me.

**Dan Lines** (0:30)
Yeah, yeah. Awesome to be here. Awesome to have you here.
Um, so usually what I like to do before we jump into the main topic, and we'll talk about measuring and, you know, kind of all of your thoughts on like, on that. I do like to give our audience a little bit of a background and some context about your organization.
So, you know, could you kind of just give us a general overview of your engineering or, like, how many teams do you manage? Any methodologies you use? I think everyone's interested. Are you all remote now or what's up?

**Luca Rossi** (1:07)
Yeah, so a little bit of background about me and the organization. I mean, I've been co-founder and CTO of Benchback Startup for about eight years. Then until in the summer, then I left to join Translated as a hardware engineer. Translated is a beautiful company that works in artificial intelligence to do translation services for big businesses and small companies alike. So on one side, they do machine translation with AI, state of the art, and on the other side, they also harness the power of professional translators to bring the best of both worlds. And they do this for companies like Airbnb, Google, but also for small companies.
So it's 100 people company, more or less, with about 20 developers divided into multiple things that are about the internal products or core technologies that power all the products.
That's more or less, yeah.

**Dan Lines** (2:28)
Yeah, yeah.
And then, yeah, one of the last questions, context wise, I like to ask, are you all remote now? Are you kind of hybrid? Are some people in office? And so what's up with your location?

**Luca Rossi** (2:43)
Yeah, consider that translated has a number of different roles because they're working with professional services, so like translation services, it has a whole array of project managers, account managers that work with customers, translators to the both sides. And then there's all the IT part of the company. So the IT is fully remote now because it's the one that it's less affected in terms of productivity and process when it comes to working from home with respect to stay in the office.

**Dan Lines** (3:18)
Yeah. Yeah. Got it.

**Luca Rossi** (3:20)
Okay.

**Dan Lines** (3:20)
Yeah. Great. Great to know. Thanks for telling us all of that about your org. So to dive into the main topic now, we're going to talk a lot about metrics here.
And one of the things that I kind of generally hear when it comes to measuring, especially measuring developers is they don't really like it.
People don't usually like to be measured. So I kind of wanted to ask you, like just off the bat here, why measure? Why measure at all?

**Luca Rossi** (3:57)
Yeah. I mean, I get it completely because I think measure can in itself is just a tool. So you can use it for good or for bad. So I completely get it, people that think that someone starts monitoring them, bringing it to a dystopian reality where their job is judged based on some hard numbers that do not reflect in their opinion, their right contribution, right?
But I mean, I start to the really basic observation that I believe that you cannot be sure that you're improving something if you don't measure it. Right. So I mean, think of trying to lose weight without weighting yourself. I mean, it's not that you cannot do this, but measuring creates such a foundation for a number of things that you are able to go on top, because if you measure stuff, then you can set goals. And if you can set goals, then you can have reviews, you can rally your team for your product goals. So it's like a foundational element that you have to put in place. Then it's not a matter of measuring everything, because measuring doesn't come for free. I mean, it takes effort.
But it's a conversation that I think we need to have with the team.

**Dan Lines** (5:26)
I've heard there's kind of like a common saying something like if you don't measure something, it kind of means either you don't care about it that much, or it's going to be pretty difficult to improve. If you want to lose weight, but you're not into measuring what your weight is, it's probably going to be pretty difficult to be get a lot of weight loss. In terms of engineering, if you don't measure a particular area, well, you don't have visibility into it. So maybe it will be harder to improve.