When I shared the Redpoint SaaS Metrics Template, I wrote about the difficulty I had identifying key engineering metrics. I was grateful for all the responses from leaders at many startups to share their expertise. I’ve updated the template with a few metrics.

Reliability - percent of application requests that load. 1 minus reliability is the percentage downtime. This measures the durability of the application.

Availability - percent of application requests that load within a certain latency. 99% uptime means for 99% of seconds within a month, the application responded to requests within 5 seconds. Each company should define the acceptable latency. This measures the responsiveness of the application.

Incident rate - support case count divided by active users. This is a proxy for product quality. If the support case count declines on a per user basis, this indicates product quality broadly defined has improved.

I think these three metrics provide a sense of engineering efforts for boards and executives to discuss. I wish there a way to get a sense of engineering cadence or productivity (similar to AE quota attainment), but that remains elusive.

Thank you to everyone who wrote in!