What do you feel are the most important metrics for an agile team to track?

Remember to describe the reason why you have included each metric you provide within your response. Offering this additional information will allow your interviewer to gain insight into your thought process as well as confidence in your understanding of the data you use to inform your decisions as a senior project manager.

"As a senior project manager, I have tracked a lot of metrics over the years. However, there are several key items I feel every agile project team should keep track of. First, it is critical for a team to know its velocity. Knowing your velocity from sprint-to-sprint helps you to identify issues and project future performance. It is also a key input to the estimation process. Likewise, it is important to track a team's cost per point, or cost per feature, or something similar. This helps with estimation and tells the story of a team's performance improvement or decline as well.

I also feel it is critical to track the remaining minimally viable product stories complete vs. left to complete. This gives a sense of how close a project team is to developing a minimally viable product that can be released and tested while the remaining features are built. Feedback is critical to the agile process, and this number helps a team estimate when that important feedback loop will be in place.

Finally, I track average time to resolve for defects and support issues. Defects often represent unexpected work, and it is important to get a sense of the volume of this work over time for planning and process improvement purposes."