How to Evaluate Your Engineering Team Without Writing Code
You Don't Need to Read Code
Every non-technical founder we work with has the same fear: "I can't evaluate my engineering team because I don't understand the code." That's like saying you can't evaluate your sales team because you don't make cold calls.
You evaluate outcomes, not implementation. Here's how.
The Five Signals That Matter
Signal 1: Shipping Velocity
What to measure: How often does new work reach customers?
| Frequency | Assessment |
|---|---|
| Multiple times per day | Excellent — mature team |
| Daily | Good — healthy process |
| Weekly | Acceptable — room to improve |
| Bi-weekly | Concerning — process friction |
| Monthly or less | Red flag — something is broken |
How to check without being technical: Ask your team lead: "How many times did we deploy to production this week?" If they can't answer immediately, that's a signal too.
Signal 2: Predictability
What to measure: Does the team deliver what they commit to?
Track this over 4-6 sprints:
- What did the team commit to at the start of the sprint?
- What actually shipped?
- What carried over?
Healthy pattern: 70-80% of committed work ships on time. Some variance is normal — zero variance means the team is sandbagging.
Unhealthy pattern: Less than 50% ships on time, or the team stops making commitments because "everything changes."
Signal 3: Incident Frequency and Response
What to measure: How often do things break, and how fast do they get fixed?
Questions to ask monthly:
1. How many customer-facing incidents this month?
2. What was the longest outage?
3. How did we find out? (Monitoring vs customer complaint)
4. What did we change to prevent recurrence?
Green flag: Team finds issues before customers do. Incidents decrease over time. Post-mortems lead to real changes.
Red flag: You hear about outages from customers. Same types of incidents keep recurring. "We'll fix it later" is the standard response.
Signal 4: Team Morale and Retention
What to measure: Are engineers engaged, or are they updating their LinkedIn?
Leading indicators:
- Engineers volunteer for new projects (engaged) vs. only do assigned work (disengaged)
- Team members help each other (healthy culture) vs. work in silos (unhealthy)
- Engineers push back on bad ideas (confident) vs. agree with everything (checked out)
- People refer friends to open roles (satisfied) vs. nobody refers (dissatisfied)
The 1:1 question that reveals everything: "If you could change one thing about how we work, what would it be?" If the answer is always "nothing," they're not being honest.
Signal 5: Business Alignment
What to measure: Does the engineering team understand why they're building what they're building?
Test this: Ask any engineer: "Why are we building [current feature]?"
- Good answer: "Because it reduces churn by making onboarding faster, which impacts our Series A metrics"
- Bad answer: "Because it was on the Jira board" or "The PM told us to"
Teams that understand the business context make better technical decisions, catch requirements gaps early, and build the right thing the first time.
The Monthly Engineering Health Check
Run this every month. It takes 30 minutes:
| Metric | Source | Healthy | Concerning |
|---|---|---|---|
| Deploys this month | Ask team lead | 20+ | < 5 |
| Sprint completion rate | Sprint retro | > 70% | < 50% |
| Customer-facing incidents | Incident log | < 3 | > 5 |
| Mean time to recovery | Incident log | < 1 hour | > 4 hours |
| Open bugs (P1/P2) | Bug tracker | < 10 | > 25 |
| Team satisfaction | Anonymous survey | > 7/10 | < 5/10 |
| Voluntary turnover (trailing 12mo) | HR | < 15% | > 25% |
The Conversations to Have
With Your Tech Lead (Weekly)
- "What shipped this week?"
- "What's blocked?"
- "What's the biggest risk to next week's plan?"
With Individual Engineers (Monthly)
- "What are you most proud of recently?"
- "What's frustrating you?"
- "Do you have what you need to do your best work?"
With Yourself (Quarterly)
- "Is the team getting faster or slower?"
- "Am I hearing about problems proactively or reactively?"
- "Would I rehire this team today?"
When to Get Outside Help
Bring in external technical assessment when:
- You suspect the team is underperforming but can't prove it
- You're about to raise and need to know the real state of things
- A key technical leader is leaving and you need to evaluate the gap
- The team says "everything is fine" but results say otherwise
- You're considering a major technical investment and need a second opinion
The goal isn't to catch people doing wrong. It's to understand reality so you can make better decisions. The best engineering teams welcome outside assessment — they're confident in their work and want validation.
The ones that resist it are usually the ones that need it most.