How Do You Measure Developer Engagement?

Howdy, Upstarts!

Building a startup is an incredible amount of work, and requires sacrifice, commitment, and dedication from every member of your team: not only from founders but also from developers. Keeping your team motivated and energized as they navigate the ups and downs of early-stage startups is critical for a startup to survive, but it is a difficult skill to master and teach.

In this series of articles, I am focusing on an important aspect of Corporate Culture that every startup leader needs to understand and master if they want to lead their lean startup to success!

It is something that I know from personal experience to be crucial for surviving the early stages of your startup’s life and it’s something that I have seen so many founders ignore: Developer Engagement.

The previous article in this series focused on providing an in-depth explanation of Developer Engagement; in this article, I will discuss how to measure Developer Engagement; and, in the final article in this series will provide some best practices on how to optimize Developer Engagement.

But you can't manage what you don't measure, so if you want to foster Developer Engagement in your startup then you need to be able to measure Developer Engagement!

Fuzzy Measurements

As I explained in the previous article of this series, Developer Engagement is the emotional connection that your software developers have with your technology product!

Because Developer Engagement is an emotional connection it can be complicated to measure, because of how subjective it can be.

Developer Engagement is not objective like the temperature on a hot summer day. We can't go to Walmart and buy a Developer Engagement thermometer. If we want to measure Developer Engagement, then we will need to get creative!

I liken measuring Developer Engagement to measuring the level of pain of a hospital patient. When I end up in the Emergency Room, doctors never ask patients for a number to describe their pain, but rather they present me a chart of cartoon emojis, ranging from smiling and happy to screaming and in anguish. I pick the emoji the best describes my feeling, and the medical nurses work from there. It’s not the most rigorous form of measuring pain, but it helps tell the staff exactly how much Morphine I am going to need!

The chart of emojis gives a good sense of my pain, and measuring Developer Engagement is going to rely on similar tools and proxy measurements.

In my experience as an engineering leader, I have learned to use 3 Proxy Measurements to estimate the Developer Engagement of my software teams:

1. How much do developers speak in meetings?

2. How often do developers use an excited or positive tone when speaking?

3. How often do developers volunteer new ideas or suggestions?

The answers to each of these questions can give an experienced engineering leader enough information to estimate a developer’s level of Developer Engagement.

How much do they speak in meetings?

Speaking in meetings is a great way to measure a team mate's comfort and interest (people tend to speak in environments in which they are both comfortable and interested), and both comfort and interest are factors that directly contribute to Developer Engagement. So the level of speech in a meeting directly measures comfort and interest, it indirectly measures Developer Engagement.

A higher level of Developer Engagement correlates to a higher level of comfort or interest, and a higher level of comfort or interest correlates to a higher level of speech.

Now, it is important to remember that the goal of measuring Developer Engagement is to increase it over time for each individual, and it is not to make comparisons between individuals. Some people are introverts and naturally disinclined to speak in meetings, but that misses the point of this metric! Experienced engineering leaders should recognize this, but not be resigned to it; increasing the level of comfort and interest for your introverted developers should still correlate to an increased level of speech in meetings, although it won’t ever be as high as your more boisterous team members. Compare each of your developers to themselves, not to others!

How often do they use an excited or positive tone when speaking?

Tone can tell you a lot (that’s why IBM Watson’s Tone Analyzer is such an amazing tool!)! I lost count of the number of times that my mother or teacher punished me for a sarcastic tone!

So you can use the tone of voice of your developers to understand a lot about Developer Engagement!

A higher level of Developer Engagement correlates to a higher level of excitement about work.

Because developers aren’t robots, it is going to be impossible to completely remove all tone from their voices and facial expressions. It is important for engineering leaders to be mindful of their developers’ attitudes, and to take the necessary steps to keep people energized and motivated. Body Language and Tone of Voice are subtle and powerful hints at what a developer is feeling.

On one Thursday (I never could get the hang of Thursdays!), one of my developers spent her morning with a slouched posture, low-energy, and a monotone voice. Her despondence was palpable, even from across the open-office workroom. My intuition told me something was wrong with my teammate! I chatted with the young woman, and it turned out that a close friend was recuperating in the hospital directly across the street from our office. I immediately instructed them to head over and see their friend for an hour; and when she returned, her mind was at ease and they were much more relaxed.

Pay attention to your developers, estimate their level of Developer Engagement, and don’t be afraid to send someone home for an afternoon if they need it!

How often do they volunteer new ideas or suggestions?

And finally, the best way to measure Developer Engagement is to take note of how often your developers volunteer ideas or suggestions.

This metric is derived from the fact that developers are skilled labor, and at the end of the day, the value that a good developer brings to a startup is not about how many hours they bring to the table, but rather is about how much thought they bring to the table.

You pay a good developer for two things: their code and their ideas!

When a developer is writing code, they are doing the bare minimum. But when a developer is giving you ideas and insights into making your product more efficient, then you are truly getting what you pay for!

Developers that volunteer ideas have a high level of Developer Engagement!

To Sum It Up...

Developer Engagement is the emotional connection that your software developers have with your technology product, and the higher level of Developer Engagement, the more reliable your engineering organization will deliver high-quality work!

Although it can be difficult to measure, I hope that I have given you some insight into ways that you can, at the very least, approximate the level of Developer Engagement of your engineering organization.

In the next articles, I will provide some best practices on how to optimize Development Engagement.