New Dev Manager

I just inherited a team of 9 developers who are working to build a product. There previous manager just quit 2 weeks ago. My title is director of infrastructure and I now have 31 people under my direction with 3 team leads. The developers have no team lead and no one interested in it, so I guess it’s me until we backfill.

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The team was right in the middle of getting their telework policy changed. They are free to telework 3 days a week, but the previous manager was fighting for the right to hire remote developers. 3 of the 9 team members are fully remote. They were in a trial period for 3 months and were supposed to show metrics that prove working remote “works”.

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I’m being asked to pick this up, but I’m not sure what measures of effectiveness or measures of performances to use for developers. We’re using gitlab community edition and I can see their milestones, issues, merge requests, etc. I don’t know if I should report on number of issues fixed, merge requests, etc. I’ve read into the agile methodology and using story points, but I’d be starting from the ground up.

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Any dev managers out there willing to give me some tips?