Organizations deploying DevOps share the goal of increasing continuous improvement and the flow of value to the customer. However, dated methods of measuring delivery that are not suitable to the age of software continue to enforce old behaviors. This creates a problematic mismatch, with DevOps teams constantly fighting against business metrics that do not support fast feedback and learning. The solution to this measurement dysfunction comes from the combination of OKRs and Flow Metrics. Focusing all stakeholders on visualizing and measuring the flow of value, and providing autonomy to value streams on how to optimize flow, creates the conditions for accelerating transformation while empowering teams.

In this talk, I will share the past two years of lessons learned from large-scale transformations that leveraged OKRs and Flow Metrics to create an end-to-end organizational wide feedback loop, as well as pitfalls that snapped some organizations back into the waterfall ways of measuring delivery.