How can management decisions lead to a train derailment and the deaths of 107 people? In the case of the Amagasaki disaster—and countless failures in software teams—the root cause was the same: the flawed use of metrics. We set out to answer a simple question: What makes a good productivity metric? But that question led us down a rabbit hole. The real insight came when we realized we were asking the wrong question entirely.

This talk explores how well-meaning teams end up optimizing for the wrong outcomes, how common engineering metrics backfire, and what to focus on instead. You'll leave with a practical framework for using metrics to actually improve team performance—without driving your team off the rails.