The Effect of Cycle Time on Dev Teams?

So I was reading this article on cycle time reduction and saw that the same company was even hosting a webinar on how a team managed to reduce their cycle time by 90%

I was wondering if cycle time was really that important of a metric in tracking a teams performance and would be a better standard to judge overall productivity?

My manager usually runs with no. of pull request and lines of code and I'd love to float this to him if it is really a viable solution.