You're Measuring Velocity Wrong
Help your team avoid busy work and burnout.
Velocity—how quickly your team builds features, fixes bugs, or completes story points. Every tool measures it. Every dashboard surfaces it. And it's the wrong thing to optimize for.
I've seen teams ship feature after feature, hit their sprint velocity targets, and still miss their business goals by a mile. They were moving fast, but in the wrong direction.
The velocity that matters
Objectives Are Not Features
Company objectives are where you want to be in the future and how you'll know when you get there. A new feature is a hypothesis worth testing to see if it moves the needle on those objectives.
Shipping more features might get you there faster. Or it might pile on technical debt, increase maintenance overhead, and take you further from your goals.
Before any feature, ask: "What objective does this serve? How will we know if it worked?"
A Framework That Works
I use Objectives and Key Results (OKRs), as described by John Doerr in Measure What Matters. Google, Intel, and LinkedIn use the same framework.
Set aspirational objectives
Define measurable key results
Understand your current baseline
Break down experiments
Measure, learn, iterate
Those experiments can be features, process changes, content, training—anything you think might move the needle. The goal isn't to run more experiments; it's to run effective experiments that teach you what works.
The Anti-Pattern
Teams fall into a pattern where they believe the next feature will solve the problem—increase users, improve retention, grow revenue. Without clear objectives and measurement, that pattern becomes busy work.
| Anti-Pattern | Alternative |
|---|---|
| "Ship more features" | Ship features that move key results |
| Celebrate velocity | Celebrate outcomes |
| Measure story points completed | Measure progress toward objectives |
| Guess what users want | Run experiments and measure results |
The Right Velocity
When you align on objectives and measure progress toward key results, velocity becomes meaningful. You can see:
- • Whether a feature moved the needle or needs to pivot
- • Where your experiments are succeeding
- • Who on your team is facing blockers you can help with
This is the velocity worth measuring: how quickly you learn what reality is and whether to pivot or persevere.
Story points tell you how much work got done. Objectives tell you whether that work mattered.
Measure what matters.
Rethinking how you measure?
I've helped teams shift from output metrics to outcome metrics. Let's talk about what you're building.