Measure your engineering investment mix and KTLO metric from Jira
See where engineering effort actually goes — New things, Improve things, Productivity, and Keep The Lights On — compared against the targets you set per team. All derived from the Jira work your teams already deliver.
What the engineering investment mix tells you
Every engineering organization is making a portfolio decision whether it admits it or not. Some of the work builds new product. Some improves what already exists. Some is pure maintenance — the KTLO metric, Keep The Lights On. And some makes the team itself faster. The trouble is that these categories rarely show up in any report, so leaders end up arguing about balance with no shared picture of reality.
Delimetrics turns the work type already recorded on your Jira issues into a clear breakdown across four buckets:
- New things — net-new features and products that move the roadmap forward.
- Improve things — enhancements, refinement, and reduction of existing pain.
- Keep The Lights On (KTLO) — the maintenance and operational work that keeps systems running.
- Productivity — investment in tooling, automation, and developer experience.
Why tracking the KTLO metric changes the conversation
When KTLO creeps up unnoticed, new development quietly starves and nobody can point to why the roadmap slipped. A measured KTLO metric makes that trade-off visible. You can see when maintenance is eating a quarter, decide whether that is acceptable, and have a fact-based discussion with your board about why velocity on new things changed.
Delimetrics automatically classifies bugs as KTLO, so the cost of defects shows up in the mix without anyone having to re-tag them. The rest of the categories follow the work type field you already use in Jira, which means the breakdown reflects how your teams actually label their own work.
Compare the mix against per-team targets
A breakdown alone is descriptive. Targets make it actionable. In Delimetrics you set the investment mix you intend to run for each team — for example a deliberate split favoring new development with a capped KTLO budget — and the dashboard shows actual delivery against that intent.
- Spot teams drifting away from their intended balance before it becomes a surprise.
- Show leadership and investors a deliberate allocation strategy, backed by delivery data.
- Track how the mix moves quarter over quarter, including a forward-looking view of planned work.
There is nothing to instrument beyond Jira. Connect Jira Cloud, map your team and work type custom fields, and the investment mix appears in minutes.
Put numbers on your engineering investment mix
Stop guessing how much effort goes to KTLO versus new development. See it, target it, and track it — straight from Jira.
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