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Measure Altana Engineering Velocity

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Your question is Measure Altana Engineering Velocity. Take a moment with it on the right.

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Problem

Business Context

Altana’s engineering organization supports the Altana Atlas platform, including graph data pipelines, customer-facing investigation workflows, and internal ML-enabled supply chain intelligence features. Over the last two quarters, leadership feels delivery has slowed: roadmap commitments for Atlas dropped from 82% on-time completion to 61%, while customer-reported Sev-1/Sev-2 incidents rose from 9 to 17 per quarter.

The VP of Engineering asks you to define a practical metric framework for measuring both success and velocity of the engineering team, without incentivizing low-quality output or vanity metrics like raw story points closed.

Requirements

  1. Define a balanced scorecard of engineering metrics for Altana, separating velocity, quality, reliability, and business impact.
  2. Identify 1-2 primary KPIs and explain why they are better than simple output metrics.
  3. Show how you would diagnose the recent slowdown using the data below.
  4. Explain which metrics are leading vs lagging indicators.
  5. Recommend what thresholds or trends would trigger intervention from an Engineering Manager.

Data Available

Data SourceDescriptionGranularity
jira_issuesTicket lifecycle: created_at, started_at, merged_at, deployed_at, issue_type, team, story_pointsPer issue
github_prsPR open/merge timestamps, lines changed, review rounds, reviewers, revert flagPer PR
deploy_logDeployment timestamp, service, environment, rollback flag, deployment statusPer deploy
incident_logIncident severity, start/end time, impacted Atlas surface, root cause categoryPer incident
roadmap_commitmentsQuarterly committed vs delivered initiatives by teamPer initiative
product_usage_eventsUsage of shipped Atlas features: account_id, feature_name, weekly active accounts, workflow completionPer event/account

Assume the Platform team’s median lead time increased from 4.5 to 8.0 days, deployment frequency fell from 22 to 11 per week, change failure rate rose from 6% to 14%, and 90-day feature adoption for newly launched Atlas workflows fell from 48% to 31%.