We learned to measure technical debt. We have not learned to measure the thing that now dominates delivery speed: the cognitive load we place on the humans who build and run our systems.
The real bottleneck
A modern product team is expected to understand its domain, its language, its framework, its cloud, its Kubernetes, its observability, its security posture and its compliance obligations. The domain is the only part that creates value. Everything else is load.
Extraneous load is a design choice
Much of the load teams carry is extraneous — accidental complexity we chose and can un-choose. Golden paths, sensible defaults and self-service are not conveniences; they are the mechanism by which an organisation reclaims its own attention.
Measuring it
- Time-to-first-deploy for a new team member.
- Number of systems a team must operate to ship one feature.
- Proportion of work that is undifferentiated heavy lifting.
Reduce these and velocity rises without anyone working harder.