

Ask HN: How does an early stage startup measure productivity of employees? - hendler

Number of code commits, lines of code might be one measure. Putting in lots of hours might be another. Responsiveness to completing minor tasks vs. big/fun stuff another.<p>Lean startups measure the progess of the product through customer validation. Maybe then, by proxy, success of the product is the only measure of employee productivity that matters, one could suppose. But is there a more direct way to measure employee productivity?<p>(This may be a managerial question, but also a way for technical employees to reflect on how they spend their time.)
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neworbit
Set short iterative milestones. Call them whatever you like to suit the dev
style you want, whether it's user stories or feature milestones or anything
else. But define what progress looks like as far as making the product better
goes and tell people to go knock it dead.

Ideally divide to the point that people can knock a few of these off in a
normal day and let your hotshots compete to see who can score highest. Give
away starbucks gift cards or cases of Bawls or the like.

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hendler
Cross posted on Quora: [http://www.quora.com/How-does-an-early-stage-startup-
measure...](http://www.quora.com/How-does-an-early-stage-startup-measure-
productivity-of-technical-employees)

