As a CXO, how do I track my development teams better?

We know so many of our customers who are executives struggle to keep track of the development teams. They either are involved in all the details or they are not involved at all. They struggle to have a balance that keeps them focussed and efficient for their development teams.

Tracking development team progress is tricky

It's not just velocity and story points completed. It's more than that.

Our Suggestions

To the CXOs who struggle with this, we have the following suggestions. We are helping many different customers in various different growth paths to optimize their businesses. These are our lessons that we learnt directly from working with them.

Double up on managers

Many small company CXOs are averse to the ideas of managers. But we suggest that when the company is growing, it is better to hire managers who can take up your responsibilities and report to you on the key metrics. This helps you to free up your time for more strategic focus and spend your time on far more important items.

Focus on a good product manager

A company that has a good product manager has already solved half of its problems. We have seen detail-oriented product managers who can understand the product and come up with a roadmap to help move the company on a growth path. But this requires a very good product manager. Invest in a product manager or you can grow somebody within your team to become one.

Forget vanity metrics

There are some metrics that the agile world swears by. Even we do that. Metrics like velocity, burn down charts and story points are very important. They are important to the team and their manager. But not to the CXOs. CXOs should concentrate on important metrics like

• Customer support tickets raised
• Unhappy NPS surveys
• Feature requests raised per quarter
• Outage SLAs breached
• Dropoffs in signups

These metrics are not exhaustive but they are a start. Also these metrics will ultimately convert to velocity, story points on the team level.

Have a quarterly check-in

CXOs should allocate atleast 1 hour every month to talk to the teams directly. This could be in any format like townhalls, informal meetups etc. This helps teams to connect with the leadership and also help to ask any questions on the path forward.

Monthly focussed check-ins

CXOs can have monthly meetings on very key metrics as listed above with their managers and may be some important people from the team. These check-ins will enable the teams to keep their focus and also help you to understand where the team is lacking.

Reward developers

Sometimes developers go around without any recognition. It's important to keep them engaged when there is a solid contribution. Identify important business value additions and keep them encouraged.