🇬🇧 Senior Developer Performance Metrics — What to Measure and Why?
The topic of developing mature senior developers resurfaces at least twice a year, and based on my experience, it requires a shift from thinking about productivity in terms of tasks to thinking about impact on the system, team, and business. Instead of tracking results (tasks, commits), it is valuable to design an environment where seniors grow through responsibility, trust, and consciously chosen goals focusing on the above.
Change the perspective: from tasks to impact
For a senior, the key is how they change the system: architecture, quality, stability, team throughput — not how many tickets they closed. In practice, this means conversations about outcomes (e.g., fewer incidents, faster delivery) instead of accounting for work (regardless of whether by hours, tasks, etc.).
Talk about business effects: feature adoption, fewer bugs, shorter time-to-market — of course, adjusted to the working environment and team realities.
Set with the senior which areas of the system and team they truly feel responsible for (e.g., domain, component, process).
Design the role, not the dashboard
A mature developer should have a scope of responsibility described more in terms of results and impact areas than a list of tasks. A well-defined role becomes the basis for development discussions — what is already delivered and what is worth expanding.
Introduce expectations like: you make architectural decisions that remove classes of bugs or you increase the autonomy of junior developers.
Regularly confront these expectations with reality in Development Talks, but based on examples and outcomes, not raw activity.
Use metrics as a tool, not a club
Metrics for seniors should mostly be system-level (quality, stability, stakeholder satisfaction), not transactional (number of commits, tasks). The same metrics can support development if they are starting points for conversation, not goals in themselves.
Areas good to base numbers on for seniors: incidents, bugs, delivery time, build stability, feedback from PM/Design.
Development through responsibility and mentoring
A key area of senior growth is influence on others: mentoring, raising technical standards, teaching decision-making. This area is hard to measure with a simple number but easy to assess through team quality and 360° feedback.
Give seniors intentional roles: workstream owner, tech lead of a specific project, mentor for 1–2 people.
Gather evidence: how code quality, junior autonomy, and technical discussion quality have changed since the senior took the role.
Work in partnership mode, not control
A mature developer expects dialogue about direction, not a top-down evaluation, so the development conversation should be co-designed paths, not imposed plans. The best results come from cyclical, honest 1on1 talks supported by data but focused on ambitions, strengths, and opportunities for impact.
Together, set 2–3 areas where the senior wants to increase their impact (e.g., architecture, people leadership, product performance) and weave them into concrete goals.
Care for autonomy: leave decisions to the senior, and you provide context, remove obstacles, and help align with company goals.