When a technology organization begins establishing processes to measure productivity, the first step we recommend is adopting the use of Epics (also referred to as milestones or initiatives). In this blog post, we’ll explain why Epics are essential and share best practices to ensure you have a reliable metric for evaluating progress.
As engineering organizations embrace a data-driven approach to management, they encounter numerous variables to measure. However, engineering leaders must carefully focus on measuring the right metrics, rather than solely relying on output metrics like lines of code or tasks completed. Overemphasizing these metrics can lead engineers to game the system, often resulting in outcomes contrary to the organization’s goals.
Instead, engineering leaders should aim for a balanced approach that combines output metrics (e.g., tasks completed) with outcome metrics (e.g., business impact). After all, it doesn’t matter if an engineer ships 10,000 lines of code in a week if those lines fail to deliver any meaningful value to the business.
This is where Epics play a pivotal role. At Kindor, we consider Epics a critical tool for evaluating team outcomes because they encapsulate work into specific goals tied to business objectives. By aligning efforts around clearly defined outcomes, Epics provide an effective way to measure the impact of your team’s work.
Regardless of the methodology your organization follows—Kanban, Scrum, Shape Up, or another—Epics can be seamlessly integrated into your workflow. Every engineering team has specific features, milestones, or initiatives to focus on within a given period, and Epics serve as a universal framework for organizing and measuring progress.
What is an Epic?
An epic is typically a large body of work that can be broken down into smaller, manageable tasks (stories or issues) that together achieve a significant goal. Epics help teams plan and track work over a longer time frame and are essential for structuring work at a high level.
An epic should encapsulate a specific value or outcome for the business, not just a vague collection of tasks.
✅ When to use an Epic:
Track all work related to a feature (The release of a specific product functionality)
Track all work related to specific technical requirement (eg. a major DB upgrade with a specific due date)
❌ When not to use an Epic:
Group all technical debt work (This could be a vague collection of tasks, that don’t have a clear outcome and could an ongoing process, not a discrete, time-bound project)
Group all unplanned or support work (Similar to previous example, this is not a clearly delimited project with a clear goal and vague collection of tasks)
What visibility will I gain by using Epics?
By correctly defining and tracking your team’s Epics, you’ll not only gain better visibility into what your team is achieving but also enable more meaningful and efficient conversations with business stakeholders.
Business leaders typically don’t care about the specifics of your processes, like whether you’re using sprints or completing 50 story points in a week. These metrics hold little relevance to them. What truly matters is understanding what features have been delivered, the status of key flagship projects, and how your engineers are allocating their efforts. These are the insights that resonate with leaders and align with their priorities.
Here are some of the most common questions, an engineering leader will be able to answer by correctly using Epics in their organization:
Where are the teams focusing this month, week, quarter, etc?
Leaders will be able to get the exact work allocation per initiative (measured in time spent, tasks completed or story points / effort) on a specific time period.
What deliverables have a particular team or contributor worked on?
Users will be able to not only track overall contributor activity, but the actual impact of the work done. By identifying the epics where a developer had a significant contribution, users will be able to tell whether they are adding value and working on the right things for the business.
What’s the status of a project? How long have we been working on it?
By correctly creating and updating the tasks and stories related to an Epic, users will be able to determine, with objective data, the progress of a project, the resources and time spent on it and even, eventually calculate the cost of a project.
What’s the amount of work dedicated to planned initiatives?
By distinguishing the tasks related and not related to epics, users will be able to tell what’s the real capacity and work allocation towards planned initiatives. Considering that an epic will generally group work towards a planned initiative.
What’s the progress of our quarterly roadmap?
If a team has a grooming and planning process every quarter to define the top priority initiatives, these should be mapped as Epics and as such, leaders will be able to track all the completed vs pending work related to epics per quarter.
What’s the running or total cost of a particular initiative?
By correctly mapping all related work to an epic, you'll be able to determine the total cost in terms of time or even money, related to this epic and later on perform better ROI calculations.
How to define epics correctly?
An epic should be large enough to encompass a significant goal, but not so large that becomes unmanageable.
Define a Clear Objective: A good epic has a specific purpose oriented towards a business or user goal.
Maintain proper abstraction: Epics should not describe how something should be implemented, but rather what is to be achieved.
Align with Product or Business goals: Ensure that each epic is aligned with the business goals or overall vision of the product.
What best practices should I follow when putting Epics into practice?
Name the Epic in a language that technical and non-technical users can understand. Remember that Epics will be used to let other stakeholders know where the team is focusing.
Define a clear scope. Avoid having eternal epics that don’t have a specific end date.
Define a deadline. This will help to understand whether the team is estimating delivery dates correctly and if they are getting better over time. Also, having deadlines have a clear impact in terms of accountability and potentiate productivity.
Define an owner. Having a clear person in charge will help to drive accountability and epic success.
Limit the number of active epics. Having a large number of Epics in progress at the same time, can become overwhelming and reduce focus.
Regularly Groom and Close Epics: When an epic’s goal is achieved, close it and move any remaining tasks into new epics or other appropriate structures.
Keep related tasks up to date. This will help to easily visualize the epic progress over time.
Conclusion
Epics are a powerful tool for structuring software projects and can be seamlessly applied to any tech organization, regardless of their workflow. They provide a simple yet effective way to communicate the value of the technology team to the rest of the company, using a language that everyone can understand.
When defined correctly and used effectively, Epics help development teams focus on what truly matters while ensuring alignment with business goals.
At Kindor, we believe every tech organization should be tracking their initiatives. That’s why we built a product designed to foster transparency across the organization. If you’re ready to elevate your tech team’s visibility and productivity, we’d love to help—reach out to us today!
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