Visible metrics that tie to company, product or infrastructure health are highly useful if they are relatively objective and not subject to gaming. But tying t

Visible metrics that tie to company, product or infrastructure health are highly useful if they are relatively objective and not subject to gaming. But tying them to individual performance is always the wrong thing in knowledge work; not only is it dehumanizing but it also fails to account for the subjectivity in any creative profession where people with the same job title work on radically different things. As a manager there are some individual metrics that could serve as a “smell” to investigate but you shouldn’t publish those metrics or ever use them in communications or as reasoning for any decision.