Biz: What if we organized around value for a change?

Many years ago, at the beginning of my leadership journey, I attended the 2014 Web Summit in Dublin¹. It was the usual whirlwind of tech optimism and relentless networking. But one talk cut through the noise. It was from John O’Donovan, who was the CTO of the Financial Times at the time². I don’t recall precisely what the presentation was about. Still, I’ll never forget the core maxim he built his talk around:

There is no Success without Measurement. And no Victory without Success

The idea is compelling. It’s the kind of statement that feels fundamentally true. To win—in business, in public service, in anything—we must first define what success looks like, and then we have to measure it. It’s the only way to know if we are making progress.

And yet, as I’ve spent years helping organizations build better technology and better teams, I’ve come to accept that the seemingly perfect maxim hides a dangerous trap. Our collective obsession with measurement often becomes the very thing holding us back. We have become masters of reporting, yet we never advance in the art of creating value.

The Measurement Paradox: Good Metrics Cause Bad Behavior

The first problem is easy to explain with the classic aphorism: you get what you measure”³. But it does not stop there. The English economist Charles Goodhart put it best: “When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure.”

As leaders, we often see this. We give a team a metric, and they will, consciously or unconsciously, optimize their work to increase that number. It’s not that they are bad employees; it’s because they are rational human beings responding to the incentives we create. They start gaming the metric instead of focusing on the result, even if the metric itself was well-intentioned.⁴

The Proxy Trap: Why We Settle for Measuring What’s Easy

That leads us to the second, more subtle problem: it’s often challenging – if not outright impossible – to find metrics that are both truly meaningful and easily measurable.

So, what do we do? We invent proxies. We measure something else that we hope is an indicator of the thing we care about.

In software development, a notable example of this is the set of DORA (DevOps Research and Assessment) metrics. DORA metrics are fantastic for what they do^{5 6}. They measure four key things: Deployment Frequency, Lead Time for Changes, Change Failure Rate, and Time to Restore Service. They give us a clear, quantifiable signal of the health and efficiency of our engineering pipeline. They help us answer the question: Are we building things in a manner that’s efficient for the purpose?

But here’s the critical distinction: DORA metrics do not, and cannot, answer the most crucial question: Are we building the right things? They don’t measure fit-for-purpose. They don’t measure business impact or customer value.

The metrics we use measure operational excellence, not business success. This problem becomes even worse when we examine internal service teams, who often have to rely on abstract proxies such as employee or customer NPS scores, making it nearly impossible to draw a direct line from their work to the company’s bottom line.

The Real Bottleneck: Your Org Chart Isn’t Built for Value

In a way – the struggle to find good, universal metrics has started to feel like fighting windmills. Why can’t we find better metrics? Or measure the real value of a team’s work?

The root cause of our measurement problem isn’t the metrics themselves. It’s the organizational structure – or Architecture, if you will.

Most technology and internal service teams operate as Cost Centers. Their primary financial objective, as mandated by higher authorities, is to manage and minimize expenses. In this model, every decision gets scrutinized through the lens of budget. A request for a new tool or an additional developer is an expense to be justified, not an investment to generate a return. This framework inherently orients the team toward efficiency and cost savings because that’s all it can control. It makes measuring actual value a fundamentally impossible task.

Now, imagine a different model. Imagine your team was structured not as a Cost Center but as an internal Profit & Loss (P&L) Unit.

In this model, your team has its profit and loss (P&L) statement. It has “revenue”— regardless of whether the revenue is virtual and derived from internal chargebacks, showbacks, or quantified value delivered to other departments. And it has expenses—salaries, tools, infrastructure. The team’s goal is no longer to control costs but to ensure its “revenue” exceeds its “expenses.” It has to generate a profit by creating tangible value.⁷

This shift is transformative. It moves the team from being a passive line item on a spreadsheet to an active, entrepreneurial business partner. The conversation changes from “How can we cut the budget?” to “Where can we invest to create the most value for our internal clients?”

The Path Forward: How to Lead a Value-Driven Team.

Restructuring your department as a profit and loss (P&L) unit is a significant organizational change. You may not have the power to do that tomorrow. But you don’t need anyone’s permission to start acting like one. Here are pragmatic steps you can take today.

1. Start by Defining “Value” with Your Customers. Forget your internal dashboards for a moment. Sit down with your key internal clients—the heads of Sales, Marketing, and Operations—and ask them one question: “What does success look like for you, and how can we help?” Work with them to define Service Level Objectives (SLOs) based on their business outcomes, not your technical outputs. “99.99% uptime.” isn’t an outcome; “ensuring the month-end reporting process runs without errors so the finance team can close the books on time.” is.

2. Build Your “Value Narrative.” Learn to translate your team’s operational metrics into a compelling business story supported by data. Don’t just report your DORA metrics; explain their impact. Before (The Proxy): “This quarter, we improved our Lead Time for Changes by 20%.” After (The Value Narrative): “This quarter, we improved our Lead Time for Changes by 20%. The faster lead times allowed the e-commerce team to launch three new product promotions a month ahead of schedule, directly contributing to a 5% increase in online sales.”

3. Introduce Financial Transparency with “Showback.”⁸ You don’t need a complex chargeback system to start a financial conversation. Begin with a “Showback” model. Calculate the fully loaded cost of your services and report it to your internal clients. You can create a simple “unit cost” for your services—cost per feature shipped, cost per user-supported, and cost per transaction processed. The change makes the cost of your work tangible and sets the stage for a more mature conversation about the value you provide in return.

The End Game?

Let’s go back to the CTO’s maxim: No victory without success, no success without measurement. He was right. But we’ve been measuring the wrong thing.

The success we need to measure isn’t just the efficiency of our delivery; it’s the tangible value we create for the business. The moment you start leading your team as a value-driven profit and loss (P&L) unit, you force this conversation. You deliver the data and the incentives that reveal what the organization truly needs.

And here’s the most interesting part: when this happens, you might find that it gives the business the real metrics it needs to reshape itself—to align its structure around the things we build and the customers we serve.

The end game is not just winning in the market; it’s about achieving lasting success. It’s about building an organization that’s perfectly structured to deliver value. That journey begins not in the boardroom but in how you define and measure the success of your team.