hardConceptScenarioCase StudyMidSeniorLeadStaff
Leadership wants DORA metrics on a dashboard for every team. How do you use them well, and how would each one be gamed?
5 min readUpdated 2026-08-15
Answer
Short answer
DORA now publishes five measures, three of throughput and two of instability, and they work because improving one dishonestly tends to show up in another. Report them as trends for a delivery system rather than as a per-team league table, and never let them into individual performance conversations.
This is a delivery metrics question before it is a dashboard question. Delivery metrics are useful only when they explain the behaviour of a delivery system: where work waits, where releases fail, and whether recovery is improving. If delivery metrics become a league table, the team learns to protect the numbers instead of improving the system.
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Likely follow-ups
- Your lead time is measured from pull-request open. What behaviour does that encourage?
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- What would you add to these to cover the things they miss?
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