Velocity Is Vanity, Outcomes Are Reality
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Velocity Is Vanity, Outcomes Are Reality
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Velocity feels like proof. Fifty story points done, a bigger number than last sprint, a box checked. But velocity measures how busy a team is, not whether anything valuable reached the customer. Kate Megaw and Ryan Smith take apart the metric everyone loves to report and rebuild the case for measuring what matters. Velocity, they argue, was never a metric at all. It is an internal planning tool, Mike Cohn's “yesterday's weather”, useful for forecasting and useless for judging. From there the conversation turns to the measures that actually signal agility: outcome over output, flow metrics like lead time, work in progress limits, emergent work per sprint, flow efficiency, and the strategic questions executives really care about, such as whether the business moved forward. Along the way Ryan shares the MVP that 300 people found on their own, and Kate lands the question that cuts through it all: if your velocity doubled tomorrow, would your customers even notice? Velocity is vanity. Outcomes are reality. Agility lives in the flow.