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Product Management Intro

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Key Concepts​

DORA Metrics​

DORA stands for DevOps Research and Assessment, a long‑running research initiative originally formed to understand what makes software teams high‑performing. It is now part of Google Cloud, continuing to publish the annual State of DevOps report. DORA’s research spans more than a decade and includes data from tens of thousands of engineering professionals worldwide. The program identified four key software delivery performance metrics (the “DORA metrics”):

  • Deployment Frequency – how often teams successfully release to production
  • Lead Time for Changes – how long it takes for code to go from commit to production
  • Change Failure Rate – the percentage of deployments that cause production issues
  • Time to Restore Service – how quickly teams recover from failures

These metrics measure both speed (throughput) and stability, showing that elite teams excel at both. DORA’s findings link strong engineering practices and healthy team culture to better organizational performance, including profitability, productivity, and customer satisfaction. The metrics are widely used across the industry as a standard framework for assessing DevOps maturity and guiding continuous improvement.