Engineering Is a Team Sport. Your Incentives Aren't.

I have a game tape dashboard. It tracks constraints and throughput across my engineering team ... PR cycle times, review patterns, where work slows down and where it moves. I built it because I believe engineering is a team sport, and team sports need game film. You can't coach what you can't see. A few years into leading my current team, I opened that dashboard and saw something I couldn't ignore. Pull requests with over a thousand lines of code were taking, on average, five minutes longer to review than PRs with two hundred and fifty to five hundred lines. Five minutes. For four times the code. The math told the story before anyone had to say a word out loud. PRs were sitting for days. When reviews did happen, they were almost always handled by the same one or two people. Everyone else had their own features to ship. The math told the story before anyone had to say a word out loud. The System I Inherited I hadn't built this team from scratch. I walked into an incentive structure that