KPIs Every VP of Engineering Must Track

The VP of Engineering must simultaneously manage output quality (what the team ships) and platform quality (how reliably it runs). The DORA metrics (deployment frequency, MTTR, change failure rate, and lead time for changes) provide the standard organizational performance framework that is research-validated and comparable across companies. The VP Engineering also owns the production reliability metrics (uptime, API latency, error rate) that directly affect customer experience and SLA compliance. Infrastructure cost is a COGS component that engineering directly controls; maintaining or improving cost per user as the platform scales is a financial responsibility as much as a technical one. Code coverage and technical debt ratio are the long-term health metrics that determine whether current engineering velocity is sustainable or being borrowed from future capability. VP Engineering must translate these technical metrics into business language for executive and board audiences, making the case for reliability investment and technical debt reduction in terms of revenue risk and velocity impact.