[codingdave]

My customers care at a high level - they are loyal to our product, and perform the majority of their jobs using our tools. They need to plan their own projects based on the release dates of our features, so they need to know if a feature is 3 weeks, 3 months, or 3 years away.

To be fair, they do not care about any specific individual developer. And I don't bother tracking individual dev performance. I track the overall delivery cadence.

Where I do care about individual developers is knowing how much they stay on-task. My teams vary from someone who will always do exactly what is outlined in the ticket, to people who second-guess and redesign the work (sometimes for the better, sometimes not), to people who go off the rails and design grand future visions that we then need to scale back to reality.

All of those people have value, but I need to manage their working style to the short-term business needs when planning upcoming work - sometimes I can let them fly free, sometimes I just need someone to put a freaking button on the screen and ship it.

So yes, it matters... micro-managing is pointless, but high level tracking helps set the correct pace of delivery.