When it comes to software development, there are two things that you shouldn't mix up.

Doing things right

This is how fast and efficient you are at making improvements. You track DORA metrics like the time it takes from a successful commit to deployed code, deployment frequency (daily vs weekly), change fail percentage, and the time it takes to recover from a failure.

This is all optimizing the development process to get to good faster. But if you work on the wrong things, you're just adding tech debt faster.

Doing the right things

This is about making sure that the features you work on have a measurable business impact and are based on the business goals.

You set a few relevant KPIs and track changes before and after feature rollouts to make sure you're increasing value.

They also serve as a guideline to detect if you're working on the right things.

Here's the thing ...

You need both.

Doing things right, without doing the right things is just burning money on development.

Doing the right things, without doing them right is a huge opportunity cost.

Do the right things right. Optimize for both aspects.

Yours,

Taj