To paraphrase: Every team, every project, every individual is different, and may need productivity measured in different ways. We've captured a bunch of differ

To paraphrase: Every team, every project, every individual is different, and may need productivity measured in different ways. We've captured a bunch of different ways to measure into several paragraphs, and think you should use this information to capture all those different measures of productivity while accounting for each unique circumstance you have. In my opinion: OK, I'm not management. I'm a developer who wants to "get in flow" and be productive. To contribute while improving my skills. Some of us are "engineers" in mindset, that is, we seek efficiency and optimization. Humans are, of course, notoriously difficult to optimize for. As a team with a project, you should have meaningful goals - this project saves time/money, reduces mistakes/friction/churn, uses up valuable resources in less quantity than the other valuable resources it ends up generating. At some level you want to dig in and optimize; that is, make sure your team has the clarity, tools and ideally, motivation to accomplish the goals you set for your project. And as human resources manager, you might see developers as tiny ROI projects where you want to pinpoint how much Return that particular Investment is giving you. It's at this point that I might say "good luck." I mean, yes, having bad members on a team isn't great, so don't throw your hands in the air and do nothing. On a sufficiently small team, where leadership understands enough about the work being done (productivity) and how the team works together and contributes, shouldn't it be reasonably apparent who is and who is not a solid contributor? As an individual contributor, I usually believe I end up with a pretty insightful view into who contributes well, and who blows smoke at each meeting while contributing poorly. Of course, at small organizations, no one dares promote me beyond my level of competence, because my contributions are too valuable. At a larger organization, I would likely be promoted, and maybe for a brief moment, I'd retain my grasp on the contributions of the team I manage, but before long, I'd be swept away into an endless stream of meetings with basically everyone except my team, and I'd have lost my ability to see into that world quite so well. I'd start to hate it and only seek higher titles and compensation but I'd have lost the will to meaningfully contribute. If I have any point in this, I think teams succeed when individuals succeed, and that happens when you remember they are humans, they want to succeed, and if you listen to their requests, make sure they know what they need to and are not resource-restrained to the point of being unable to succeed, they will probably be happy to contribute. You can always have bad seeds, but going into it with a mindset of measuring, managing and optimizing humans is probably setting yourself up for failure.