Scatter · Diagram Design

Deploy frequency vs. lead time · 12 teams

Each point is an engineering team. Moving right means deploying more often; moving down means shipping faster. The Platform team occupies the lower-right — the ideal quadrant.

Deploy frequency vs. lead time · 12 teams Scatter plot showing twelve engineering teams by deploy frequency and lead time, with Platform in the best-performing quadrant. LEAD TIME (DAYS) DEPLOYS PER WEEK 6 12 18 24 0 0 4 8 12 16 20 PLATFORM HIGH LEAD TIME LOW LEAD TIME LEGEND Platform team · best performer Engineering team Trend

BEST PERFORMER

Platform team · (18, 3)

18 deploys/week with a 3-day lead time. This combination is achievable because they own the full stack — no cross-team approval gates, and their CI pipeline runs under 4 minutes.

Correlation is clear

Every team to the right of the median deploy frequency (8/week) is also below the median lead time (12 days). The relationship isn't causal — both are symptoms of the same underlying practice: small, frequent, reversible changes.

Two outliers worth examining

The team at (2,20) ships rarely and slowly — high coupling, long approval chains. The team at (12,10) deploys frequently but with higher-than-expected lead time — likely a large monorepo with slow integration tests.

deploy frequency vs. lead time · 12 teams example · diagram design