Realised our engineering brand is weaker than we thought because we cannot talk about delivery performance with actual numbers
Had an interview recently with a strong senior engineering candidate and they asked questions I honestly was not prepared for in enough detail. Things like deployment frequency, lead time for changes, and incident recovery metrics.
I gave high-level answers, but afterwards it hit me that we mostly operate on intuition rather than properly measured engineering performance. Internally we know where the bottlenecks are, but externally we cannot communicate operational maturity in a convincing way.
What surprised me is how much this affects hiring and company perception. Strong candidates increasingly evaluate engineering teams the same way buyers evaluate SaaS products, they expect measurable operational credibility, not just good culture and interesting work