Good article breaking down the limitations of the science driven approach to productivity that Accelerate presents, and some of it’s harder to prove claims.

I did find the capabilities and KPIs that Accelerate emphasizes useful, however. I agree with the author that there are a lot of other issues (such as building the wrong thing) that impact a businesses overall success. However if you’re on a team that’s focused on developer productivity, the four metrics offered (Deployment frequency, Lead time for Changes, Time to Restore Service, and Change Failure rate) are pretty good ones to focus on.

I also found surveys useful at identifying gaps in monitoring, detecting sources of toil among an engineering team, and gauging overall employee satisfaction, though they are not great at getting granular data. That said, they can provide good areas to dig in with more ethnographic research methods.