Metrics That Actually Move the Needle - Building a continuous improvement culture in engineering

Thursday, August 20 | 5:00–6:00 PM PT | Online

Engineering teams measure a lot. But not every metric leads to better decisions, better systems, or better outcomes.

The real challenge begins when metrics move beyond dashboards: when they shape priorities, influence team behavior, reveal where systems are improving or breaking down, and help leaders decide where to invest attention.

We’ll discuss

1. What makes a metric useful: How leaders distinguish between metrics that create insight and metrics that only create reporting activity.
2. Choosing the right signals: How teams identify the few measures that reflect engineering health, customer impact, execution quality, and long-term system improvement.
3. Turning metrics into better decisions: How leaders use data to guide prioritization, tradeoffs, team focus, and investment without reducing engineering work to vanity numbers.
4. Building continuous improvement into the culture: How teams create mechanisms, rituals, and feedback loops that help people improve without making metrics feel punitive.

Hosted by

Dharmesh Thakkar, Senior Software Development Manager, Amazon Elastic Block Store (EBS) @ AWS

Dharmesh Thakkar is a technically grounded and business-savvy engineering leader with over 15 years of experience across software design, development, product strategy, and organizational execution. His work spans building and scaling teams, evolving culture and mechanisms, driving organizational and product design, and creating processes that help teams deliver with a singular focus on delighting customers.

Join this conversation with engineering leaders working through one of the most important questions in engineering leadership today:

How do we use metrics not just to track work, but to build teams and systems that keep getting better?