What metrics are you using to show the business value of your software team (especially when you’re communicating with C-suite)?

The C-suite doesn’t care about “velocity” or “story points”. They care about how the software team drives business outcomes. The trick is to translate engineering signals into language that connects to revenue, cost, risk, and growth.

Metrics That Resonate With the C-suite:

1. Speed to Value: lead time, deployment frequency (how fast we turn ideas into customer value).
2. Customer & Revenue Impact: feature adoption, conversion uplift, churn reduction, NPS/CSAT.
3. Reliability & Risk: change failure rate, MTTR, uptime/SLA (protect revenue + reputation).
4. Efficiency: delivery vs. headcount, cycle time, % time on innovation vs. maintenance.
5. Talent Health: attrition, engagement, cross-team collaboration (capacity risk).

How to Communicate Them:

• Tell business stories: “5h faster recovery = ₹50L saved this quarter.”
• Show trends, not snapshots — trajectory matters.
• Tie metrics to company goals (expansion → speed, margin → automation).
• Balance leading (dev happiness, cycle time) and lagging (revenue, churn) indicators.

The best metrics translate engineering signals into business outcomes: faster delivery, happier customers, lower risk, better ROI, and healthier teams.

I would highly recommend you first ask what you and your software team are expected to deliver.

You can have excellent team metrics, great team morale, crushing the work and still not be delivering the "right" thing.  See what the executives expect, then ensure you put together a plan that aligns tech/product roadmap to those expctations.

Then explain what you're going to measure, and how it directly, 100% ties into progress on expected outcomes.

I've had teams that were killing it on all SWE metrics, yet the business wasn't seeing the value.  This was because the product roadmap was all about HUGE features.  This was a huge "what have you done for me lately" culture, so I had to work with product to ensure we delivered smaller itereations to internal and external users so our great internal metrics were ALSO able to be aligned with external outcomes more often.