The GTM vs. R&D Measurement Gap

There's an asymmetry at the heart of every tech company that nobody likes to talk about. Sales gets measured on revenue. Engineering gets measured on vibes.

A salesperson who says "you can't quantify what I do" gets shown the door. Their pipeline, their close rate, their bookings — all imperfect, all gameable, but all tangible. The number is the number. Meanwhile, engineering has been hiding behind "software is creative work" for two decades, and it's worked, mostly because nobody had a better answer.

Both things can be true at once. Engineering work is creative and context-dependent. Quality does matter more than quantity. And the business still needs some way to see whether the team is performing. Refusing to engage with measurement isn't intellectual rigor — it's an abdication.

This is why frameworks like DORA and SPACE exist. They're not perfect, but they push teams toward outcomes (deployment frequency, lead time, change failure rate) and flow (interruptions, focus time, satisfaction) instead of vanity activity metrics like commits per day. The point isn't to reduce engineers to numbers. The point is to give leaders a vocabulary for asking "is this team healthy?" that goes beyond "the eng manager seems happy."

I've argued elsewhere about the AI coding tool wrinkle that's about to make this even harder. AI assistants generate a flood of new micro-signals — prompts, accepts, rejects, iterations — and there's a strong temptation to treat that telemetry as a measurement breakthrough. It isn't. It's just more noise unless you're already grounded in outcomes.

The gap between sales and engineering measurement isn't going to close by making engineering "more like sales." It's going to close by engineering leaders accepting that being legible to the business is part of the job. Outcome metrics, peer feedback, manager judgment, business impact — a portfolio, not a single number. Anything less and you're inviting somebody less thoughtful to pick the metric for you.