Weekly Reflection #10 - Be Successful on Purpose
Each week, I share one insight. One piece of wisdom. One question to reflect on. (and a little Lagniappe)
Insight
Sam Barlien highlighted this stat from the State of Platform Engineering 2025 report: 30% of platform engineering teams don't measure their success at all. Nothing.
You might stumble into good outcomes for a while, but without measurement, you can't prove what caused them, defend your budget, advocate for headcount, or show leadership why your work matters. When cuts come (and eventually they always come), unmeasured teams are first on the list.
This isn't just lazy; it limits your career, team effectiveness, and business outcomes.
To fix this, start small. Pick one or two metrics that align with your team's goals. If you focus on developer productivity, track lead time. If reliability is your priority, measure change failure rate. Establish a baseline, review it regularly, and iterate as you learn. Now you're being successful on purpose.
Wisdom
"Follow effective action with quiet reflection. From the quiet reflection will come even more effective action." — Peter Drucker, The Effective Executive (1967)
Reflection
What does success look like for your team—and are you measuring it?
Lagniappe
- Do you know a team struggling in that 30%? Let's talk.
- We just hit 100 episodes of Book Overflow! To celebrate, I built a new page where you can browse and search all our episodes: https://bookoverflow.io/episodes
- Debug Mode is coming up — free live office hours where founders and engineering leaders can bring platform engineering, infrastructure, SRE, DevOps, or other problems and get real-time help. Sign up here if you want to join.
- As always, I'd love to hear your thoughts. Reply and let me know what resonates.