Measuring engineering organizations in the age of AI

Cortex CTO and co-founder Ganesh Datta introduces the DRIVE framework, which measures organizational effectiveness across five pillars paired with recurring Operational Excellence reviews. Unlike SPACE, DX Core 4, and DORA, which focus on individual developer productivity, DRIVE describes whether the organization around developers can deliver. Cortex’s 2026 benchmark report found that rising pull request throughput was accompanied by rising incident volume, indicating organizations are producing faster than they can safely operate.