Measuring software engineers productivity has been a meme and the butt of jokes for decades.
However, I think there are things worth measuring that do help manage success and are not intrusive.
For example, giant pull requests or pull requests that go into production with no/minimal review are likely to create problems. We use LinearB to point this sort of thing out automatically.
Code with high cognitive complexity is likely to generate bugs (and be hard to maintain). There are many other similar issues that can be automatically detected. We use SonarCloud for this.
Asking an engineer "How do you feel about work overall", "your personal well being", "career growth", "work relationships", and "impact & productivity" on a scale of horrible to outstanding once a week prior to 1:1 meetings allows each engineer to tell you their story in numbers. If you have built a culture where people trust that you care about them, you will get honest answers. This helps discuss and correct things that bother your team members, and in aggregate shows whether you have a problem with leadership and/or culture that needs to be corrected.
Those are the numbers I gather, and it takes a lot of the gut feel and guesswork out of management.
However, I think there are things worth measuring that do help manage success and are not intrusive.
For example, giant pull requests or pull requests that go into production with no/minimal review are likely to create problems. We use LinearB to point this sort of thing out automatically.
Code with high cognitive complexity is likely to generate bugs (and be hard to maintain). There are many other similar issues that can be automatically detected. We use SonarCloud for this.
Asking an engineer "How do you feel about work overall", "your personal well being", "career growth", "work relationships", and "impact & productivity" on a scale of horrible to outstanding once a week prior to 1:1 meetings allows each engineer to tell you their story in numbers. If you have built a culture where people trust that you care about them, you will get honest answers. This helps discuss and correct things that bother your team members, and in aggregate shows whether you have a problem with leadership and/or culture that needs to be corrected.
Those are the numbers I gather, and it takes a lot of the gut feel and guesswork out of management.