SDD Factory Dashboard: The Leading and Lagging Indicators That Actually Matter

Classic delivery metrics lie inside the SDD factory. Meet the leading and lagging indicators, the metric-countermetric pairs, and the dashboard review cadence that actually work.

A green dashboard is supposed to mean a healthy factory. In Spec-Driven Development factories, the greenest dashboards are the ones lying most brazenly. I’ve watched it happen firsthand: the board looks at a deployment-frequency chart climbing for the third straight quarter, while the engineering team already knows the next big change will sit stuck in code review for weeks.

Velocity climbs quarter over quarter. At the same time, the queue of pull requests waiting on human review swells faster than anything else on the same board — and almost nobody assigns it a number, even though it’s the clearest signal of an approaching jam in the entire factory. This dashboard isn’t lying on purpose — it’s lying structurally, because it measures activity at the exact moment the board really needs an answer to a different question: is this factory healthy, or just busy.

What follows is a five-category taxonomy of leading and lagging indicators — paired with concrete…