Output is high. Commits are flowing. Everyone looks productive.
But nothing meaningful is changing. Now that’s a problem.
It’s like running a call centre where everyone’s smashing their targets and not a single customer issue gets solved. What’s the point in that.
Activity was never the same thing as progress
Commit frequency, PR count, story points closed. They’re easy to track, which is exactly why so many businesses still lean on them. But easy to track doesn’t mean it tells you anything useful.
One analysis of how engineering leaders are rethinking measurement in 2026 puts it plainly: individual-level metrics like commits and PRs merged are consistently unreliable as productivity indicators because they’re easy to game. Engineers optimise for the metric, not the outcome. PR count goes up. Code quality goes down. Commit frequency increases. Meaningful delivery doesn’t.
That’s not a people problem. It’s a measurement problem, and it’s costing more than most boards realise. One 2026 industry review found that the probability of a production incident per merged PR has more than tripled year-over-year, with bugs per developer up 54%. Teams can look busier than ever while quietly building more risk into the product with every sprint.
The metric everyone argues about, and why that matters to you
Even the experts don’t agree on how to measure this well. When McKinsey published a widely read piece arguing developer productivity could be measured directly, it triggered a genuine backlash from senior figures across the industry, with one prominent critic calling the framework “so absurd and naive that it makes no sense to critique it in detail”. The practical conclusion most of the industry has landed on since is simpler than any dashboard: measure team outcomes and the conditions engineers work under, not individual output.
That’s the shift that matters at board level. Activity metrics report on effort. Outcome metrics report on value. One shows up as a busy team. The other shows up in revenue, retention, and growth.
Where the gap actually shows up
At board level, that gap shows up as cost without return. Salaries paid, sprints run, velocity charts trending up and to the right, and none of it moving the numbers that actually matter to the business.
With djr, you tap into game changing engineers who focus on what actually moves revenue, retention, and growth, not what looks good on a standup slide. And right now, other businesses are already making that shift while you’re still measuring activity.
If that gap is starting to show internally, it’s worth addressing now, not next quarter.
