Own the metric, not the ticket: notes from a product engineer

At Arbor, engineers do not pick up tickets. Each one owns a number, such as no-shows, time to seat a walk-in or bookings made on mobile, and decides with design and product what to do about it. That includes talking to restaurant owners, running experiments and, quite often, deciding that the obvious feature is the wrong one.

Tomás describes a year of working this way on Arbor’s booking product. He covers the weekly rhythm, the conversations with owners at four in the afternoon when the kitchen is quiet, how he decides what to measure, and what happens when an engineer’s favourite solution and the data disagree. He is honest about the costs: some weeks there is less code, and not every engineer enjoys it.

The talk is for engineers who want more say in what they build, and for managers deciding whether to give it to them.

What you will take away

• What changes, day to day, when engineers own a metric instead of a backlog
• How to run a short customer conversation that leads to a better technical decision
• The conditions this model needs, and the signs that it is not working