KPI should do that. However it is very hard to measure the useful things in advance. The real measure is the bottom line after the product is released until it stops production. If you have an apprentice plumber cleaning out clogged drains it is easy as you work for a couple hours and then you get a check a month later. (this is a reasonable example of something easy to measure, but I doubt any plumbing company ever operated this way). However a lot of software is on a very long release cycle with hundreds of other developers. Even if you are Google and deploy to production often it can still be a long time before you start work on some feature and it is actually useful to customers, and then you are constantly enhancing things for the next version so that is even more noise making it hard to measure what has a useful impact.